When she began to champion her cause, she found that Ottawa, at last, was ready to honour its native heroines and their comrades-in-arms. The town held fish-fry fundraisers and staged plays to secure the $80,000 needed. ‘The mayor was supportive,’ said Len Grossman. ‘It was a complete turnaround. That was wonderful to see.’
On 2 September 2011, the bronze statue for the dial-painters was unveiled by the governor in Ottawa, Illinois. It is a statue of a young woman from the 1920s, with a paintbrush in one hand and a tulip in the other, standing on a clock face. Her skirt swishes, as though at any moment she might step down from her time-ticking pedestal and come to life.
‘The radium girls,’ the governor announced, ‘deserve the utmost respect and admiration . . . because they battled a dishonest company, an indifferent industry, dismissive courts and the medical community in the face of certain death. I hereby proclaim 2 September 2011 as Radium Girls Day in Illinois, in recognition of the tremendous perseverance, dedication and sense of justice the radium girls exhibited in their fight.’
‘If [Marie] saw that memorial down there today,’ said Marie Rossiter’s daughter-in-law, ‘she wouldn’t believe it. When I go downtown and I go past, I say, “Well, Marie, they finally did something!” If she was alive today to see the statue, she would have said, “About time.”’
The statue is dedicated not only to the Ottawa dial-painters, but also to ‘dial-painters who suffered all over the United States’. This bronze radium girl, forever young, forever present, stands for Grace Fryer and Katherine Schaub; for the Maggia and Carlough sisters; for Hazel and Irene and Ella too. She stands for all the dial-painters: whether they lived and died in Orange, in Ottawa, in Waterbury or anywhere else. It is a fitting and most deserving memorial. After all, there is so much to thank the women for.
‘The studies of the radium dial workers,’ wrote Dr Ross Mullner, ‘form the basis of much of the world’s present knowledge of the health risks of radioactivity. The suffering and deaths of these workers greatly increased [scientific] knowledge, ultimately saving countless lives of future generations.’
‘I always admired their strength,’ said Catherine Donohue’s great-niece, ‘to stand up and unite.’
And, united, they triumphed. Through their friendships, through their refusal to give up and through their sheer spirit, the radium girls left us all an extraordinary legacy. They did not die in vain.
They made every second count.
POSTSCRIPT
‘We girls,’ said one worker, ‘would sit around big tables, laughing and talking and painting. It was fun to work there.’
‘I felt lucky to have a job there,’ revealed another girl. ‘The job paid top dollar for women in this area. All of us got along real good.’
‘We slapped the radium around like cake frosting.’
The women wore smocks; washed once a week amidst the family laundry. They drank open cans of soda through their shifts, sourced from the machine in their studio. They worked with bare hands and painted their fingernails with the material ‘for kicks’; they were allowed to take radium home to practise painting.
There was radium everywhere in the plant – and outside on the sidewalk. Contaminated rags piled up in the workrooms or were burned outside in the yard; radioactive waste was emptied into the toilet of the men’s washroom; ventilation shafts discharged above a nearby children’s play area. The women didn’t clean their shoes before they left work, so they walked the radium all over town.
‘You couldn’t work in that plant without getting covered with the stuff,’ one dial-painter recalled. ‘Sometimes I’d get up in the night and look in the mirror and my hair would be glowing.’ The women’s hands ‘would be bleeding’ as they tried to scrub away the supernatural shine.
‘The company,’ said one girl, ‘always led us to believe everything was under control and safe, but I don’t think they cared.’
She was right. Before too long, the workers started suffering. ‘I had to have a mouth operation,’ said one, ‘but now my teeth are so loosened that they are probably all going to fall out . . . I have a blood disease I can’t seem to get rid of.’ The women noticed tumours appearing on their feet; their breasts; their legs. ‘They kept cutting her leg off,’ one woman recalled of her colleague Ruth, ‘until they couldn’t cut any more. Ruth finally died.’
The women went to their supervisor, worried sick. ‘A man from the New York headquarters came out here,’ a radium girl remembered, ‘and told us [our work] wouldn’t hurt us.’
‘Breast cancer,’ said the executive, ‘is thought to be a hormonal problem, not a radioactivity hazard.’
But he was mistaken. ‘The link between radiation and breast cancer,’ observed a national cancer-institute specialist, ‘is one of the best-established relationships there is.’
The executive continued to bluster: ‘The plant manager isn’t entirely to blame. Employees are responsible for safety too.’
But there were no warning signs in the workrooms. The women had been told that, as long as they didn’t lip-point, they would be perfectly safe.
These women worked in a little town called Ottawa, Illinois.
These women worked for Joseph Kelly’s firm, Luminous Processes.
The year was 1978.
The original radium girls were indeed Cassandra-like in their powers; and just like Cassandra, their prophecies were not always listened to. Safety standards only keep you safe if the companies you work for use them. Concerns had been raised about the Ottawa plant for decades, but it wasn’t until 17 February 1978 that the dangerous studio was finally shut down: inspectors found radiation levels were 1,666 times higher than was safe. The abandoned building became something of a bogeyman for Ottawa residents, who became afraid to walk or even drive past it; it was graffitied with the slogan: DIAL LUMINOUS FOR DEATH.
‘A lot of us are dead,’ one LP dial-painter stated bluntly. Of a hundred workers she mentioned, sixty-five had died; the cancer rate was twice as high as normal.
Yet Luminous Processes was unapologetic. It wriggled out of paying clean-up costs, contributing approximately $62,000 ($147,500) to the multi-million-dollar bill, while executives used ‘doubletalk’ to put off the women when they demanded answers. Workers were offered just $100 ($363) in severance pay and had difficulty suing the firm. ‘They didn’t have any respect for the health of the girls,’ one LP worker spat. ‘They were just interested in getting the work out.’
‘Luminous Processes,’ declared the local paper, ‘seems to put profits before people.’
How quickly we forget.