The Radium Girls

Ordinary women in 1920s America. All they wanted was the chance to shine. Be careful what you wish for. The Radium Girls' story began as the First World War was raging across the globe. Radium-luminous dials were in great demand - needed for airplanes, submarines, warships and soldiers' watches. Dial-painting was a glamorous and artistic profession. Radium was the 'wonder drug', used internally and externally for all sorts of ailments, and added to everything from children's sandboxes to women's beauty products. The dialpainters were told it would make their cheeks rosy. The work was well-paid and the women 'lucky' enough to secure jobs ranked among the top 5% of female wage-earners. And the radium did make the women glow. A Harvard study described the workers as 'luminous', stating: 'The hair, faces, hands, arms, necks, the dresses, the underclothes, even the corsets, were luminous ... they glowed like ghosts in the dark.' Using it as a beauty product they slicked it through their hair to streak it with an incandescent glow; painting it onto their eyelids and fingernails. But after a few years their aspirational dreams started to fade and infections set in. Aches and pains that simply wouldn't go away. Wounds that didn't heal. Tissue rots around their teeth, and the jaws themselves, too, deteriorate: calcium bone crumbling into useless smithereens. Yet still the dial companies deny that the paint is poisonous, that the work is harmful in any way. The women go into fast decline as the radium poisoning sets in - and no one seems able to stop it. Amidst the horror of a certain death, these women must find the courage to fight for justice and force the courts to pronounce radium as a toxic subject to protect other women from being harmed - before it's too late. They must make every second count. But time is running out.