Historian Clark (Central Michigan Univ.) analyzes the early efforts
of reform-minded women to obtain recognition of radium poisoning,
win compensation for its victims, and prevent future harm. In the
1920s, several thousand young women in New Jersey, Connecticut, and
Illinois were exposed to radium while employed to paint luminous
numbers on watch dials. When disease and death followed, the dial
painters attempted to prove that radium poisoning was the cause.
Without the assistance of the Consumers' League, a women's
voluntary society committed to improving working conditions for
women and children, their plight might well have gone unnoticed.
Clark shows how various forces within society responded to this
industrial health issue. Not surprisingly, the radium business
resisted efforts to identify radium as a poison or to regulate its
use. Scientific researchers, often associated with the radium
business and hoping to establish radium as a powerful new medicine,
were also at first reluctant to view it as a hazard. But under
pressure from the Consumers' League, the scientific community
finally recognized radium poisoning in 1925, and the league then
helped the dial painters appeal to state and later federal agencies
and courts for compensation. While the FDA and the FTC investigated
the medical safety of radium, its industrial safety was left to the
voluntary efforts of business. The league stepped in here, too,
persuading the US Public Health Service in 1933 to recommend safety
practices. If Clark, who worked for six years in the chemical
industry, has one take-home message, it is that workplace health
and safety require constant vigilance from worker and citizen
groups armed with their own scientific experts. Adroitly combines
social, industrial, and labor history to demonstrate the impressive
power of determined, organized women. (Kirkus Reviews)
In the early twentieth century, a group of women workers hired to
apply luminous paint to watch faces and instrument dials found
themselves among the first victims of radium poisoning. Claudia
Clark's book tells the compelling story of these women, who at
first had no idea that the tedious task of dialpainting was any
different from the other factory jobs available to them. But after
repeated exposure to the radium-laced paint, they began to develop
mysterious, often fatal illnesses that they traced to conditions in
the workplace. Their fight to have their symptoms recognized as an
industrial disease represents an important chapter in the history
of modern health and labor policy. Clark's account emphasizes the
social and political factors that influenced the responses of the
workers, managers, government officials, medical specialists, and
legal authorities involved in the case. She enriches the story by
exploring contemporary disputes over workplace control, government
intervention, and industry-backed medical research. Finally, in
appraising the dialpainters' campaign to secure compensation and
prevention of further incidents--efforts launched with the help of
the reform-minded, middle-class women of the Consumers'
League--Clark is able to evaluate the achievements and shortcomings
of the industrial health movement as a whole.
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