Written by Erika Holst, Illinois State Museum History Curator 

For many young women in the 1920s and 30s Ottawa, Illinois, working at the Radium Dial Company painting luminous numbers on clock faces was a dream job. The wages were excellent, far more than they could hope to earn in other positions open to women. Best of all, they got to work with radium, the most valuable substance on earth, considered at the time to be a miracle element that would give health and vitality to anyone who came into contact with it. 

When painting dials, the girls were instructed to use their lips to give their brushes the fine point required to paint numbers on tiny watch faces. The process was known as “lip, dip, paint.”  Each time a girl put the brush into her mouth, she ingested a microscopic amount of radium. They were told that not only was this process completely safe, but that ingesting radium would put “roses in their cheeks.” 

Within a few years of the Radium Dial Company’s opening in 1922, some of the girls started to feel ill. They experienced fatigue, loose teeth, aching hips, sore jaws, limps, and pains in their hands and feet. They read in the paper that workers at a Radium Dial factory in New Jersey were dying of radium poisoning. They demanded answers from the company as to whether their work was putting their health in jeopardy. 

The Radium Dial Company assured them that radium was completely safe. They did so despite evidence to the contrary. Internal studies showed radium was a poison that settled in the bones and irradiated its victims from the inside out. Private tests on workers that showed many of them were radioactive. More and more workers were falling ill, and some of them were dying. 

By the 1930s, as many became more and more ill, Radium Dial workers knew radium poisoning was to blame. Their medical bills were piling up, further stressing the financial woes caused by the Great Depression. Some thought of suing the company, but in the small town of Ottawa, no local lawyers wanted to go up against a powerful company that was providing jobs to so many of its citizens.  

In 1935, a handful of former Radium Dial workers – Inez Vallat, Charlotte Purcell, Catherine Donohue, Pearl Payne, Marie Rossiter, and Frances O’Connor retained a Chicago attorney to sue the Radium Dial Company for damages. In response to the lawsuit, the Radium Dial Company argued that the women’s disabilities had happened after they left the company’s employment and that poisoning was not covered by the Occupational Diseases Act. The women lost this case and all appeals, even to the US Supreme Court. 

In 1938, the women finally received justice when the Illinois Industrial Commission ruled that Catherine Donohue’s disabilities were the result of radium poisoning contracted on the job. She was awarded past medical expenses, back pay, and an annual life pension of $277 for the remainder of her life. Donohue died within months of this ruling.  

Today it is unknown how many women died of radium poisoning due to their work at the Radium Dial Company. Many of the early deaths were misattributed to Diptheria, strep poisoning, or cancer. Many more lived but suffered debility, disease, or amputation. Yet the courage and sacrifice of these women saved thousands of others. The radium girls’ case was the first in which a company was held responsible for the health of its employees. Their experiences laid the groundwork for the passage of the Occupational Health and Safety Administration Safety standards were set in place for later generations of radium dial painters.