The case study developed in this book provides a window on the industrial health movement in the United States during a 25-year period early in this century. The main subjects of the study, female wage earners who applied radium-based luminous paint to dial instruments and watches, had the misfortune of becoming among the first occupational groups to suffer radiation poisoning. Claudia Clark cogently explores the complex ways in which the recognition of radium poisoning, measures to safeguard against it, and compensation for it were tied to concerns about workplace control.
These issues, she shows, not only were hotly contested between employers and employees but also became the focus of social reformers, who at the time were increasingly demanding that government exercise its authority to regulate working conditions. Among the important participants in the debate were scientists, whose testimony presented a facade of neutrality but whose research findings frequently were influenced by their employers, their sources of funding, or both. Clark adeptly demonstrates that the story of the dialpainters is not about medical science intervening to dictate standards for industrial safety and health, but rather about the influence of politics in that process.
Radium Girls tells yet another story about how the maximization of profits is capitalism’s guiding principle at any cost; and how everybody, politicians, scientists, people in the legal and medical profession cater to this principle–except women reformers. It seems like an all too familiar tale, however.
Claudia Clark weaves an intricate pattern, making us see and understand how political, social, and scientific developments, personal motives and dependencies, chance and the historical moment come together to give proof to this simple truth. It is the story about a rather small number of young women who in the 1920s work as dialpainters, applying self-luminous paint to wrist watch dials. Unwittingly they accumulate radium in their bones causing their bodies to decay. Many of them die a slow death. By telling their story, relying among other sources on the autobiographical account of one of the victims, Clark provides the larger and very detailed picture of the trials and efforts of industrial health reform. The main line narrative is the dialpainters’ attempt to get their illnesses recognized as radium poisoning caused by working in the radium industry, getting it recognized as an occupational disease with appropriate compensation.
The various sub-narratives are manifold: the development of radium research including the history of the use of radium as medicine, a usage which is mainly promoted by those who have a financial interest in radium sales; the process of establishing radium poisoning which Clark convincingly describes as a political process not as one of medical “discovery,” as well as, the history of factory inspection with its varying political dependencies and opportunisms, the construction of legal cases to prevent the dialpainters from getting effective compensation; the personal and financial motives of the various experts not to speak out in favor of working women; the yellow press constructing the “perfect horror story” with all the necessary ingredients (the young innocent girls dying a slow but certain death, succumbing to fate); and the involvement of progressive women in various reform issues, especially the Consumers’ League, which brings people, networks and money to the case.
It acts as the main instigator of research on radium-related industrial diseases and as the most ardent supporter of the women seeking their rights. Alice Hamilton, as medical expert, industrial reformer, and socially conscious woman becomes the main witness. The book begins by tracing the discovery of radium poisoning early in the 1920s by the dialpainters at the Radium Luminous Materials Corporation in Orange, New Jersey, and their health care providers. Several of the earliest sufferers of radium-related illnesses began working as dialpainters during World War I. When they were hired, the dialpainters were led to believe not only that working with radium materials was safe but even that it could have curative benefits.
In fact, the founder of the company, Sabin von Sochocky, had developed radium medicines before he discovered that radium could cause paint to luminesce. Ignorant of the potential health risks they faced, dialpainters routinely “lippointed” — used their mouths to draw their paintbrushes to a point — which exposed their mouths and faces to direct contact with radium and inevitably led to the ingestion of the radioactive material. In only a few years, several dialpainters began to show symptoms such as necrosis of the jaw and anemia. Workers’ doubts about the paint’s safety were aroused by these illnesses and by the eventual deaths of several women. Although these suspicions were supported by physicians who had treated several workers, the company was quick to deny that any hazards were associated with dialpainting.
In time, a handful of dialpainters, chief among them Katherine Schaub, insisted that there was something inherently dangerous about their work. Opposing these women, however, were powerful organizations, notably New Jersey’s state labor bureau, that were specifically structured to protect the interests of businesses from those of labor, and Clark argues that the dialpainters would not have prevailed without the assistance of the New Jersey Consumers’ League. The League deployed its network of social reformers and reform-minded scientists, like Doctor Alice Hamilton, to collect data needed to establish the existence of radiation poisoning.
These efforts were at first frustrated by the unwillingness of the scientists to present research that undermined the radium industry, which often was the primary funding source for their work. Moreover, radium-related businesses had their own corps of scientists, many of whom, like von Sochocky, not only had a financial stake in refuting the existence of radium poisoning, but also may have feared acknowledging the hazards to which they themselves had been exposed. Nevertheless, through the Consumers’ League’s contacts data became available that firmly established the existence of radium poisoning among the dialpainters.
The Consumers’ League achieved some success in reforming working conditions despite unresolved questions regarding the paths of exposure. Claims by some scientists that workers were poisoned through the ingestion of radium in lippointing led to the discontinuation of that practice; claims by others that exposure occurred through the inhalation of radium dust led to other safety improvements. The Consumers’ League also managed to obtain some compensation for the workers. Clark astutely argues that the handling of the compensation awards largely depended on the relationship between the radium businesses and the state.
The radium company in Connecticut enjoyed the protection of government officials who frequently acted to protect business interests. While Connecticut workers’ compensation laws provided compensation for industrial illnesses, and would probably have covered radium poisoning, the state’s pro-business sympathies meant that radium business leaders were fairly confident in their ability to avoid the kind of high-profile civil suits that had been conducted in New Jersey. Lacking a network of social reformers actively supporting their cause, several Connecticut dialpainters agreed to private settlements quietly arranged for by their employers. In New Jersey, in contrast, radium business leaders enjoyed much less influence and were subjected to greater public scrutiny than their Connecticut counterparts.
Under these circumstances the New Jersey Consumers’ League helped to orchestrate media coverage of a well-publicized lawsuit that forced radium business leaders to reach an out-of-court settlement providing several dialpainters with small annuities and continued payment of medical expenses resulting from radium poisoning. In the end, not only did the New Jersey Company have its reputation scarred, but it was also forced to pay a higher average settlement than those reached in Connecticut. It is in this discussion that Clark most clearly illustrates the greater influence of political process than of medical intervention in determining the treatment of the dialpainters.
Clark describes, with indignation, the ways in which the dialpainters’ status as industrial workers prevented them from receiving adequate support from government agencies. Particularly unhelpful was the federal government. Proactive in regulating the sale of radium for its supposed medicinal qualities, the federal government apparently preferred to steer clear of involvement in establishing work standards, essentially ceding that responsibility to the radium businesses themselves. In part, the greater solicitude for medical victims than for industrial victims reflected the attitudes of scientists acting as government advisers. Their skepticism about the research purporting to establish radium’s curative effects was at least equaled by their apprehension that such claims, if proved incorrect, would tarnish their profession’s image. No similar self-interest moved them to speak on behalf of the “radium girls.”
Under-analyzed in this otherwise insightful study are the roles of gender and class. Clark recognizes that the dialpainters, as female wage-earners in a sex-segregated occupation, lacked the kind of support from labor unions that might have been available to skilled male workers at the time. She suggests that gender substituted for class as the working-class dialpainters formed an alliance with the middle- and upper-class female social reformers active in the Consumers’ League. This account, however, assumes that there is a single understanding of “gender” that is free of class-based norms. Indeed, Clark offers no evidence to indicate that the “cross-class” alliance she describes is reciprocated or premised on a mutual understanding between the middle-class reformers and the working-class women of what “woman” actually means.
She also fails to question the gender-based assumptions implicit in the Consumers’ League lawyers’ advocacy of protective labor legislation for women. Hours restrictions and other laws often were justified on the grounds that it was in the state’s interests to protect women as mothers. Moreover, Clark does not discuss scientists’ and medical professionals’ assumption that women, particularly working-class women, suffered from weaknesses peculiar to their sex that made them more susceptible than men to occupationally related health hazards. Such an analysis might have shed additional light on scientists’ and policy makers’ treatment of the dialpainters. Despite this flaw, Clark’s study is an important contribution to the historiography of the occupational hygiene movement in the United States.
In conclusion it becomes apparent that since controlling research on industrial health became a primary corporate concern and since the trust and faith in so-called autonomous experts in government and medicine caused the failures of industrial health reform, workers not only must fight business influence on government agencies but must conceive themselves as experts who better recognize occupational dangers and “find their own medical experts and finance their own industrial disease investigations” (210).
Clark shows great knowledge and in-depth understanding of very disparate fields: physics, medicine, law, political structures, and sometimes the reader get lost in the intricate details of these disciplines. However, she provides judicious and engaging summaries, not shunning ethical issues and moral challenges. It is these deliberations which make the book a pleasure and a profit to read.
References
Claudia Clark. (1997) Radium Girls: Women and Industrial Health Reform, 1910-1935. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 289 pp. ISBN 0-8078-2331-7.
