The Radium Girls as an Embodied Health Movement

 

The so-called Radium Girls were a group of five women who sued the Radium Dial Company after contracting radiation poisoning from painting watches with radium and licking the paintbrushes. As can be seen, the work was advertised as ‘clean’ despite their eventual deaths from contact with radium.

In her paper, The “Western disease”: Autism and Somali parents' embodied health movements, Claire Decoteau analyzes Somali parents’ organization in response to higher purported levels of autism among their children. This organization and mobilization is similar to the ways that the Radium Girls handled their situation. For one, the Radium Girls also formed an “embodied health movement”, in line with Decoteau’s criteria that EHMs “introduce the biological body into social movements, challenge existing medical knowledge and practice, and involve collaborations between activists and scientists” (Decoteau 2017:170). The women’s bodies were a central aspect to the case and to its publicity, it challenged existing medical knowledge (and claims by the company) that radium was safe, and medical professionals worked with them to determine the cause of their affliction.

Additionally, Decoteau illustrates the importance of race, nationality, and immigrant status for the formation of the Somalis’ politicized collective illness identity (Decoteau 2017:170). Because they identify aspects of autism as related to their “experiences of forced migration and racial exclusion”, they mobilize to critique this marginalization (Decoteau 2017:170). Similarly, I argue that the Radium Girls’ identity as workers played a role in their own formation of a politicized collective illness identity. This lawsuit, where employees sued their employer for damages, was seemingly one of the first of its kind for the U.S. in 1928. By choosing to litigate, these women were not only acting as individuals seeking compensation for damages, but asserting their right as workers to seek justice from their employers for poor working conditions. Indeed, this lawsuit would bring national attention to worker safety and would spur the establishment of occupational disease protections.

Works Cited

Balkansky, Arlene. 2019. “Radium Girls: Living Dead Women | Headlines and Heroes.” Loc.gov. Retrieved (https://blogs.loc.gov/headlinesandheroes/2019/03/radium-girls-living-dead-women/).

Decoteau, Claire Laurier. 2017. “The ‘Western Disease’: Autism and Somali Parents’ Embodied Health Movements.” Social Science & Medicine 177:169–76. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2017.01.064.

Neuzil, Mark. 1996. Mass Media and Environmental Conflict. SAGE Publications, Incorporated.