The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women

It is 1917, and 14-year-old Katherine Schaub is on her way to her new job at the Radium Luminous Materials Corporation’s watch-dial factory in Newark, New Jersey, where she will paint numbers on watch faces in luminous, radium-based paint after a brief apprenticeship in quality control. The studio almost exclusively employs young women, whose work is considered “glamorous,” and pays better than most other work available to young women at the time. The workers are eagerly recruiting their friends and family members to work at the factory.

Katherine has seen the many advertisements for products that include radium and is enchanted by the substance. When scientists discovered radium’s power to treat cancer, its reputation as a miraculous substance grew, and it has made its way into countless consumer products and is featured in cartoons and songs.

It is the height of World War I, and business is booming at the factory as radium is used to make paint for watch-faces, gunsights, and other war-time products. The job of painting dials on watch faces is precise, demanding, and important, as most of the watches will be used by soldiers on the front lines. To create the extremely thin lines required for the watch faces, the girls “lip-point” their brushes, putting them in their mouths to form the bristles into a sharp point.