“These women were not victims they fought back and were aided by other women,” Hamilton said. Hamilton said although media at the time often portrayed girls poisoned by radium in a negative light, the young women earned public support. “Tragically, may have contributed to the most gruesome deaths from radium poisoning,” she said. “The ’20s brought them opportunities, liberation to work outside the home.” Women who could produce painted dials more quickly, inserting the paintbrushes into their mouths to keep the bristles together, often were the first to die, Hamilton said. “Most of them were young women, in mid-teens to early 20s,” Hamilton said. Kelly Hamilton, associate professor of history at Saint Mary’s, said many of the women working in the factories who were exposed to the radium were young and had their whole lives ahead of them. And so the next time somebody would identify a problem, they would pass another law,” Fick said. “They would identify a specific problem, but then they wouldn’t address anything else. Unfortunately, Fick said, the regulations that did exist were inadequate. “In terms of government regulation in the 1920s, it was relatively new, and obviously, there were no federal regulations, so it was left up to the states,” Fick said. “The main character, Grace, is outraged to learn that workers in the lab had screens to prevent their exposure to the radiation, unlike she and her fellow dial painters.”īarbara Fick, a professor at Notre Dame Law School, said in absence of unions, workers depended on the government to keep the workplaces safe. “‘Radium Girls’ hints at the workplace realities faced by workers separated by skill and usually by gender as well,” he said. Graff said workers, especially female ones, couldn’t advocate for themselves in the way unions could have advocated for their rights. “There’s a lot in it that generates a lot of interest in a lot of different disciplines,” she said.ĭan Graff, a labor historian and director of undergraduate studies in Notre Dame’s Department of History, said unions have traditionally played an important role in creating a safe workplace.Īt the time of the play in the 1920s, most industrial workers like the ‘radium girls’ were unprotected by unions, and they had to rely on their employers to provide a safe workplace,” Graff said. “Radium Girls” has been produced more than 300 times in the United States, Gregory said, and mostly by education theater programs in high schools and colleges. It was about the period when women were just beginning to find their voices.” And it wasn’t just the story of the men and women, but it was the story of the culture of the expectations of the time. “For me, it wasn’t so much what happened, as it was why did it happen and why does it keep on happening.”It wasn’t just the story of the women, it was also the story of the men. “I knew from the beginning that I wanted to take a closer look at what it is that leads these kinds of things to happen,” she said. Gregory said the culture of compliance in the 1920s contributed to creating victims, and in the specific case of radium, women were often harmed. I was going to look through diaries, journals to tell the story of the women in their own words, but I quickly found out that none of that existed in any form that I could have access to.”It became clear that if I was going to tell this story, it was going to have to be a fictitious recount.” “My original idea was that I was going to go out and find all this source material. “I thought, ‘Oh gosh, here’s a play,'” Gregory said. Gregory said she didn’t begin work on the play until about 10 years later when she was scrolling on the Internet and discovered an article about a case in New Jersey involving radium poisoning of women. “I wanted to know more about what happened to the women.” “I remember watching this documentary, ‘Radium City,’ and just feeling like there was so much more to the story,” Gregory said. Gregory said she was inspired to write the play, a story about radium poisoning of female factory workers who painted the dials on watches in 1920s New Jersey, by a documentary about radium poisoning. The talk, titled, “Radium Girls: Opening the Door to Justice,” was sponsored by the Justice Education department. Gregory, author of the play “Radium Girls,” which was performed on campus this weekend.
Experts from the Saint Mary’s and Notre Dame community contributed to a panel discussion Friday with D.W.
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