The Radium Girls: An Illinois Tragedy
By KATIE BUCK • JAN 25, 2018

Part 1: Radium poisoning took the lives of perhaps thousands of female factory workers, many in Ottawa, Illinois, in the last century.

She was among the last of her kind, but longevity in this club was a mixed blessing. On August 25, 1959, Beatrice Workman died of radium poisoning. The 54-year-old Park Ridge, Illinois resident had worked in the 1920s at the Ottawa, Illinois Radium Dial Company, which hired women to paint watch and clock dials with radium-laced, glow-in-the-dark paint. Workman first experienced pain in 1936, but doctors told her it was arthritis. "The real source of her trouble wasn't found until she was examined at Presbyterian-St. Luke's Hospital," the August 27, 1959 Rockford Register-Republic reported. That was 21 years later.

There were likely thousands of dial painters who died from radium poisoning, although there's no definite number, according to Kate Moore, author of the 2017 book, The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women. Besides the Ottawa plant, the women had worked at radium companies in New York, Connecticut and New Jersey. Most died young, decades before Workman.

That included many women in Illinois. Some of the Ottawa painters, despite their long, agonizing illnesses with crippling sarcomas, crumbling jawbones, crushed spines, amputated limbs and other maladies, were among the luckier ones. Because of Illinois' progressive workers' compensation laws, some of the Radium Dial workers received financial awards.

"Illinois was one of the earliest adopters of workers compensation law in 1911. The final state to adopt it was Mississippi in 1948," says Russell Lewis, executive vice president and chief historian of the Chicago History Museum. Illinois' law led to the creation of the Illinois Industrial Commission in 1917, and it was this body that sided with one of Ottawa's most well-known dial painters in 1938. Although dial painters in other states sought retribution for their fatal illnesses, those in Ottawa were the only ones "to win state sanctioned compensation for radium poisoning," wrote Claudia Clark in Radium Girls: Women and Industrial Health Reform, 1910-1935.

In the 1920s, watch advertisements touted the wonderful radium dials that let owners tell time in the dark. They became top sellers and production ramped up. Radium Dial hired women, girls mostly — some as young as 11 and 13 according to Moore's book — to paint the watch dials. Precision was key, so the girls were taught to create a fine point of the paintbrush bristles with their lips. With each lick, they ingested radium.

Their bosses said the paint wouldn't hurt them. They told the girls it would make them beautiful. The radium became a toy.

{snip}