Along the way it speaks of fear and loyalty and truth itself.įirst, I want to say that a three-star review from me is not a negative review. The story goes beyond the Radium Dial case and reflects much about our attitudes toward work, women, mental illness and aging. Stout has found a unique voice in which to tell the tragic story of the Radium Dial workers and at the same time to say much about life in this country. Sometimes fiction can speak truth in ways that the bare facts cannot. So when I came across Radium Halos by Shelley Stout I was very excited. I am sure this background is one reason I became a government lawyer enforcing workers' rights. I was deeply proud of my father and infuriated, as he was, by the injustice inflicted on these women. I grew up in the shadow of the Radium Dial case, a landmark in workers' rights in this country. Grossman, represented women from Ottawa, Illinois in litigation against the Radium Dial Corporation seeking not merely damages but also recognition of what had been done to them. Includes a Foreword by Leonard Grossman, son of the attorney for the Radium Dial painters.įive years before I was born, my father, Leonard J. She tells us her story through flashbacks, slowly revealing her past, the loved ones she's lost, and the dangerous secrets she's kept all these years. Our narrator is Helen Waterman, a 65-year-old mental patient who worked at the factory when she was 16. The lasting legacy of the women's fight led to the introduction of new safety standards to protect a whole new generation of dial painters, as well as those working with plutonium in making atomic bombs.Radium Halos is historical fiction based on the true events of the Radium Dial Painters, a group of female factory workers who, in the early 1920s, contracted radiation poisoning from painting luminous watch dials with radium paint. It took eight appeals before the former radium girls finally had a victory, in October 1939. An autopsy soon proved that "each and every portion of tissue and bone tested gave evidence of radioactivity". During the case, the body of Molly Maggia was exhumed and taken away for an autopsy.Īccording to Moore, Maggia's body was in "a good state of preservation" five years after her death. In 1927, five former dial painters, led by Catherine Donohue and represented by lawyer Leonard Grossman, (working pro bono), filed a legal case against the US Radium Corporation. vmzIvyoOPC- Pulp Librarian JanuA VICTORY AT LAST After a long trial and painful testimony they won their case. It took the death of a male employee of the radium firm for experts to finally take the issue seriously.įinally in 1938 five women - dubbed the Radium Girls - sued the Radiant Dial Company they worked for after Radium exposure left them close to death. But 800 miles away in Ottawa, Illinois, where a new studio had opened, the painters were unaware of the problems - and their employers did not inform them of the now-established danger." Moore writes: "In New Jersey, the women's illnesses had an understandable effect on the profession's popularity: dial painting declined. The only study into the safety of radium was conducted in the same factory.Īccording to Moore, instead of radium firms suspending dial-painting, the managers refused to accept any responsibility and vowed to find the "real cause" of the women's illness. Radium was not suspected at first because the official line was that it was safe in small doses. sbR334rpAE- Pulp Librarian JanuON THE BRINK OF DEATH In the 1920s it was marketed as a 'scientific' panacea of wellness. Radium and radioactivity was soon a main ingredient in quack medicine: with extravagent claims made for its health-restoring and energetic properties.
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