Radium Girls

Women and Industrial Health Reform, 1910-1935

Claudia Clark

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2000
• ISBN:
  9780807860816
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In the early twentieth century, a group of women workers hired to apply luminous paint to watch faces and instrument dials found themselves among the first victims of radium poisoning. Claudia Clark's book tells the compelling story of these women, who at first had no idea that the tedious task of dialpainting was any different from the other factory jobs available to them. But after repeated exposure to the radium-laced paint, they began to develop mysterious, often fatal illnesses that they traced to conditions in the workplace. Their fight to have their symptoms recognized as an industrial disease represents an important chapter in the history of modern health and labor policy. Clark's account emphasizes the social and political factors that influenced the responses of the workers, managers, government officials, medical specialists, and legal authorities involved in the case. She enriches the story by exploring contemporary disputes over workplace control, government intervention, and industry-backed medical research. Finally, in appraising the dialpainters' campaign to secure compensation and prevention of further incidents--efforts launched with the help of the reform-minded, middle-class women of the Consumers' League--Clark is able to evaluate the achievements and shortcomings of the industrial health movement as a whole.

1
WATCH ALICE GLOW

The New Jersey Radium Dialpainters

The first illnesses linked to industrial radium poisoning came to light in Orange, New Jersey, beginning in 1922, among women who had been employed to apply luminous numbers on dials. To these women, the “dialpainters,” must be attributed the “discovery” of radium poisoning, although others would claim that honor. Experts’ diagnosis of radium poisoning followed a long campaign by the dialpainters for medical and legal acknowledgment of the existence and cause of their illnesses.

Among the first to make the connection between dialpainting and the dialpainters’ illnesses was Katherine Schaub, a dialpainter herself. We know more of Schaub than of most dialpainters. She participated in a lengthy and notorious damages suit against her employer, which was covered, often melodramatically, in newspapers and magazines. Her lawyer’s records, detailing her testimony, survive. An extensive medical record yields further details about this dialpainter and her life, and one physician, Harrison Martland, saved letters she wrote to him expressing her fears about her illnesses and treatments. Finally, Schaub wrote about her trials and triumphs, and a brief autobiographical fragment, published in a social reformers’ magazine, is extant. As an individual, Schaub deserves a place among those influential in discovering and responding to radium poisoning. As one of a group about which, as a whole, we know relatively little, Schaub, in this account, also serves as the quintessential dialpainter, whose reactions and actions we must take as tokens of her coworkers’ responses.¹

Katherine Schaub was born in Newark, New Jersey, on March 10, 1902, the second child of William and Mary Rudolph Schaub. William Schaub’s occupation is uncertain: on Katherine’s birth certificate it appears in a handwritten scrawl that might read “baker”; a newspaper of 1928 lists him as a “Mason,” but this might be a social affiliation, not a trade. Mary Schaub, according to her daughter’s birth certificate, was an “H.K.,” which must mean housekeeper. These occupations would fit the profile arrived at by an impressionistic review of various dialpainters’ families. The dialpainters seem to have come from moderately well-off working-class families. Fathers or husbands worked at semiskilled or skilled trades, as plumbers, hatters, carpenters, and machinists. At least a few families owned their own homes. Like Katherine Schaub, most of the Orange dialpainters were born in the United States of American-born parents, many with German surnames, but about a third of the women were first-generation Americans whose families had immigrated most often from Ireland or Italy.²

Although there is no record of impoverishment among such families, there was enough financial need to send daughters out to work. Most of the dialpainters were young women from their midteens to early twenties. Generally, they were single and lived with their parents. Dialpainters quit work either on marrying or with their first pregnancy.³

Death and ill health were no strangers to workers or their families in the early twentieth century and often led to the formation of extended households. As a child Katherine Schaub lived with her parents, her two sisters and two brothers, a grandfather, and a cousin. The cousin was variously known as Regina, Virginia, or Irene Rudolph, but most often the latter. She was Katherine’s age, born, like Katherine, in Newark in 1902. Rudolph had lost both parents to “consumption” (probably tuberculosis) and a sister to meningitis. In 1919 Mary Schaub would die of mastoiditis, an infection in a sinus behind the ear, which spread into her brain. Katherine’s oldest sister, Josephine, then took over management of the household.⁴

Two years earlier, in 1917, Katherine Schaub and Irene Rudolph had started jobs in the newly opened “dialpainting studio” of the Radium Luminous Materials Corporation in nearby Orange, New Jersey. They were both fifteen years old. Schaub had become a lively young woman, known for her good looks—blue eyes, attractively bobbed fair hair, a “pretty little blond”—and her friendly, social disposition—she “like[d] the nightlife.” No description or photographs of Rudolph survive. The cousins painted luminous numbers on watch and clock dials.⁵

The Radium Luminous Materials Corporation was begun by the Austrian immigrant Sabin von Sochocky, a medical doctor and physicist, with a partner who was also a physician; originally, both practitioners were interested in radium medicines. In 1915 von Sochocky developed a formula for a self-luminous paint. It contained but an infinitesimal quantity of radium, which, by releasing alpha particles, stimulated zinc sulfide in the paint to luminesce. This paint could be produced cheaply.⁶

The widest use for radium paint would be found in the luminous dial industry. World War I promoted both a new kind of timepiece and a need for luminous instrument faces. Before the war pocket watches had been the common personal timepiece for men, but soldiers found that these interfered with the creeping and slithering of trench warfare. They coped by transferring their time pieces to their wrists, thus the wristwatch. Synchronizing movements in the dark was also difficult, creating the need for a luminous wristwatch. Soldiers found the self-luminous wristwatch a most practical timepiece; so did Americans at home. The luminous wristwatch became a fad in America, first for men and then for women when ladies’ wristwatches were introduced around 1920. The military also used radium paint on instrument dials in tanks, ships, planes, and other war machines, while those at home found domestic uses for luminous paint, such as glow-in-the-dark numbers for houses or theater seats and luminescent lamp-pulls. But the watch or clock face remained the most commonly luminized surface.⁷

Around 1917 the Radium Luminous Materials Corporation undertook a major expansion. The firm acquired radium mines in Colorado’s Paradox Valley and bought an extraction plant in Orange, a city just west of Newark. A new dialpainting studio was built in Orange to New Jersey factory law specifications—offering “ideal working conditions,” a company vice president bragged.⁸

The new plant was not without its problems, however, and the company’s response to neighborhood grievances hint at how it would handle the dialpainters’ later charges. In 1919 residents in the vicinity of the radium plant complained of harsh fumes. Laundry hung out to dry turned yellow, and it was so difficult to breathe that one morning gas masks were improvised. The local health department investigated, and legal proceedings were started to close the plant. When the company added equipment to its stacks to scrub out the acids causing the problem, the city dropped its suit. A company official later recounted that, although he was sure it was not the plant’s fault, he had given a local woman five dollars in compensation for ruined laundry. But then, everyone else wanted money, too. People in this “poor, residential neighborhood” were “anxious to take advantage of the company.” More compensation was not forthcoming. The new equipment did help decrease the acidity of the fumes, but the remaining fumes continued to raise protests in the neighborhood.⁹

The dialpainting studio was considered a good place for a woman to be employed. Applying the paint to watch dials and watch hands was delicate, exacting work that required a light touch and several weeks of training. Women, according to the prevailing stereotypes, were seen as particularly fitted to this work because it required little strength but much manual dexterity. As semiskilled laborers, dialpainters received relatively good pay, for women. An average dialpainter made about the same as the average woman worker elsewhere in New Jersey, but a dexterous dialpainter could earn much more. The median income for women around this time was about $15 dollars a week, with the better paid obtaining about $23. The average full-time employee at the Orange studio might draw about $20 a week painting about 250 watches a day, at one and a half cents per piece over a five-and-a-half-day week. A quicker worker could earn $24 or more during the same time. Of course, like most piecework jobs, dialpainting was not always regular, and dialpainters faced periods of no work or slack work; thus their average earnings were closer to the state average of $15 dollars a week. But during the war work was plentiful. In 1913 several small companies produced about 8,500 luminous watches; by 1919 a few larger, more centralized radium companies made 2.2 million luminous watches. In New Jersey the number of dialpainters rose from the 100employed in 1916 in Newark to an average of 300 in Orange in 1917 and 1918. In 1919 about 200 women painted dials for the Radium Luminous Materials Corporation.¹⁰

The dialpainting studio, built on the second floor of one of the new buildings in Orange, was a pleasant place to work. Light streamed in through large windows. In front of the windows were long tables at which the dialpainters sat. The room was quiet and the young women gathered there could socialize. Most of the dialpainters were neighbors. They came from Orange and walked or took the trolley to work, or, like Schaub and Rudolph, they commuted from Newark by train. One former employee remembers them as “pleasant girls and young women, many of them high school girls wanting a good summer job.” Another recalled: “We were a fine upstanding bunch of girls, even though not many of us had been to high school. We were always neatly dressed—in our shirtwaists and skirts—and we worked hard in the studio.” Such enjoyable surroundings prompted the women to encourage friends and relatives to become dialpainters, and often families sent two or more daughters to the Orange studio. Schaub found the work “interesting and of far higher type than the usual factory job,” and she had enticed her cousin Irene Rudolph to join her there.¹¹

Besides the good pay and pleasant working conditions, the cousins had other reasons for liking their jobs. Many of the watches produced were sent overseas to soldiers, and Schaub noted that “I was pleased with the idea of a job which would engage me in war work.” Some of the young women would scratch their names and addresses into these watches, and sometimes a lonely soldier would respond with a letter.¹²

Part of what made dialpainting an attractive job must have been the work with such a sensational product. The young women applied radium to their buttons, their fingernails, their eyelids; at least one, described by a friend as “a lively Italian girl,” coated her teeth with it before a date, for a smile that glowed in the dark. After working in the studio, the women were covered with luminous powder. At night, at home, they would notice that their clothes luminesced, their fingers glowed, their hair shone in the dark. One young dialpainter, employed during the summer by a dialpainting company in Brooklyn, would return from work “with her hair and dress speckled with yellow. Sometimes we’d get the neighborhood kids to watch Alice glow in a dark closet. They’d get a good laugh out of that.”¹³

The women worked at their own pace, rather than on an assembly line. They mixed the dry luminous paint powder with paste and thinner, carefully pointed a small brush with their lips before dipping it in the paint, and then meticulously filled in the numbers and other marks on the watchfaces arrayed on trays before them. This method was followed for water-based paint used on paper watchfaces; metal watchfaces required a paint thinned with turpentine, and the awful taste precluded the lippointing of brushes. But at Orange, most of the work must have been paper dials, because former employees always recall being taught to lippoint. Schaub herself became an “instructress” at the plant. “The method of pointing the brush with the lips was taught us, to give the brush an exceedingly fine point,” she remembered. “I instructed them to have a very good point on the brush. ... I instructed them to put the brush in their mouth to get the best point on it.”¹⁴

The technique of lippointing was little remarked. The earliest dialpainters had been drawn from the china painting industry, where lippointing was employed, and they passed on the technique. Moreover, because radium was being sold by the Radium Luminous Materials Corporation for medicinal use, dialpainters’ exposure to the element was considered good for their health. As an example of the corporate attitude, in 1920 the New Jersey company was selling the residue from radium ore at the end of the extraction process as sand for children’s playboxes. Some parents expressed concern about the radioactivity remaining in the sand, as the extraction process was at best only 85 percent efficient. Dr. von Sochocky assured them that the sand was “most hygienic” for their children to play in; in fact, it was “more beneficial than the mud of world renowned curative baths.”¹⁵

Only once did someone at Orange suggest a problem. According to one dialpainter, von Sochocky warned her that putting her paintbrush in her mouth might make her sick. She then “spoke to different people about it and talked to the woman in charge and she told me it wasn’t so.”¹⁶

Meanwhile, precautions with radium were taken in parts of the plant. Florence Wall was hired during the war as an assistant to von Sochocky. While working in his physics lab, she was required to wear protective clothing and to work behind screens. In 1920 the Electroscopic Laboratory, where radioactivity measurements were made, was moved a mile away from the extraction plant and dialpainting studio because the “open radium” at the plant contaminated the readings.¹⁷

At some point during her employment, Schaub—perhaps just a typical teenager—broke out in pimples. She consulted a doctor, who asked her if she worked with phosphorous. Phosphorous poisoning was well known among New Jersey’s working class, and because the element was phosphorescent, it was logical to suspect its presence in the luminous paint. Schaub became alarmed at the idea that her work might be dangerous. She shared her worries with coworkers, who became concerned as well. As a result, both von Sochocky and the medical colleague with whom he had started his business lectured the dialpainters, convincing them that their work was not hazardous. For a while, small bowls of water were provided so the women could rinse their brushes before pointing, but these were soon discontinued because too much paint was being wasted in the rinsing.¹⁸

Katherine Schaub was not unfamiliar with the concept of industrial disease, since she suspected (with some prodding by her physician) that phosphorous poisoning had some relation to her outbreak of pimples. Chronic phosphorous poisoning became a notable disease with the invention of the “lucifer match,” a strike-anywhere match that became popular in the 1830s. White (sometimes called yellow) phosphorous contributed to the matches’ flammability. Often, women and children were employed in factories to coat matches with phosphorous, exposing them and adult male coworkers to phosphorous fumes. Chronic exposure to the fumes led to phosphorous poisoning, with three major symptoms. One symptom was anemia. A second was that the bones became so brittle that they were prone to easy fracturing. The final and most notable symptom was phossy jaw, whereby phosphorous fumes attacked the gums in mouths with carious teeth; symptoms included tooth loss, gum swelling, necrosis (decay) of the jaw bone, facial disfiguration, and terrible pain. Infection of the decaying tissues could kill. Because these symptoms were similar to those that radium would eventually produce in the dialpainters, phosphorous poisoning would be suspected—not illogically—by workers and their families and physicians as a cause of the dialpainters’ illnesses.¹⁹

English physicians recognized phossy jaw and its cause by the 1860s, and by the 1870s European nations began to outlaw the use of white phosphorous in match formulas. This process accelerated after the discovery in 1897 of an alternative formula for matches. In 1906 the International Association for Labor Legislation called a conference at which eight European countries agreed to prohibit the production or importation of white phosphorous matches. In 1909 the American Association for Labor Legislation (AALL) undertook an investigation of the American match industry. Because the federal Bureau of Labor had been studying women and children employed in match factories, the two investigations were dovetailed to avoid duplication of labor. Despite manufacturers’ assertion that phosphorous poisoning was not present in American factories, over one hundred cases were quickly uncovered. The AALL published its findings in the Bulletin of the Bureau of Labor, and ultimately, in 1912, the U.S. Congress passed a prohibitive tax on white phosphorous matches, thus effectively bringing an end to their manufacture.²⁰

Physicians and workers in the industrial area of northern New Jersey were surely aware of phosphorous poisoning, for several reasons. For one, there was the publicity attending the American investigation and legislation. For another, of the sixteen U.S. match factories, two were in New Jersey, close to Orange, one in Passaic and one in Garfield. Further, the 1912 law did not end the threat of white phosphorous to workers, for it was still used in the manufacture of fireworks through the mid-1920s. Several small fireworks firms lodged briefly in Newark and the surrounding area before World War I, and afterward one of the three biggest fireworks manufacturers utilizing white phosphorous located in nearby Berkeley Heights. Cases of phossy jaw in fireworks producers were uncovered in the early twenties, including cases in New Jersey.²¹

Katherine Schaub, her family, and her friends may have known about another industrial hazard in this period, mercury poisoning. The “great mercury-using industry” of the early twentieth century, according to a 1911 study by the Women’s Welfare Department of the National Civic Federation, was felt hat manufacture, and “the heart of the industry” was in the Newark-Orange district. To make felt, furs were first treated with a mercury solution in a process called “caroting,” and in that and all subsequent operations workers were subject to mercury poisoning from inhalation of dusts and fumes or from absorption through the skin.²²

Early symptoms of chronic mercury exposure are vague: malaise, depression, headaches, nervousness, ins...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• RADIUM Girls
• Copyright Page
• CONTENTS
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• 1 WATCH ALICE GLOW
• 2 THE UNKNOWN GOD
• 3 SOMETHING ABOUT THAT FACTORY
• 4 A “HITHERTO UNRECOGNIZED” OCCUPATIONAL HAZARD
• 5 A DAVID FIGHTING THE GOLIATH OF INDUSTRIALISM
• 6 IS THAT WATCH FAD WORTH THE PRICE?
• 7 GIMME A GAMMA
• 8 WE SLAPPED RADIUM AROUND LIKE CAKE FROSTING
• CONCLUSION
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX