Celebrating the 'Radium Girls' and Working Women Who Fought for Their Rights
March is Women's History Month, a time when Americans remember the courage and commitment of women the world over.
Mar. 25 is a grim anniversary during this month of remembrance. On that date in 1911, a fire broke out at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in New York City. Inside the building, laboring under sweatshop conditions, female garment workers were trapped by locked doors that blocked their attempts to flee the burning factory. Of the hundreds of young women working in the factory, only a few survived. New York and the nation were horrified at the death toll of 146 women killed in the fire. Most were Italian immigrants or European Jews trying to make a new home in America. Dozens jumped to their deaths from the windows of the 10th floor garment workshop.
The infamous Triangle Fire underlined the concerns of the labor movement at the time that workers were expendable in a corporate world that would place profits above the lives of people. The corpses of scores of young women lying blackened and bloodied on the sidewalks of New York were mute testimony to the long and ongoing campaign for economic justice and safety in the workplace being waged by the labor movement in America in 1911. They were martyrs to a cause that still is relevant today in America and around the world.
Just a few years later, the issue of the health and safety of women in the workplace would again make headlines across this nation and around the globe. During and after World War I, hundreds of women were employed at companies in Illinois and New Jersey that used radium, a radioactive element. The United States Radium Corporation and the Radium Dial Company had profitable military contracts to provide luminous dials for airplanes, tanks, ships and the watches worn by soldiers. The pay was good, the working conditions were friendly, and the soft glow in the dark emanating from the women's hair, skin and clothing was looked upon almost as a status symbol by the working class girls and women who could afford the latest fashions because of their jobs at the radium facilities.
Read more: https://flagpole.com/news/street-scribe/2020/03/04/celebrating-the-radium-girls-and-working-women-who-fought-for-their-rights
(Athens, Georgia Flagpole)
= new reply since forum marked as read
at a dermatologist in Nashville. Don't remember exactly, but it would have been between '60 and '65.
My Depression-era parents were poor but tried their very best to give me a good start in life, including support in college. They just didn't know that treatment was wrong and neither did the doctors.
I've often wondered if that could explain some of my memory issues through adulthood.......
Nah.... that's just part of growing up
Re reading this post I totally forgot about my Mom's leg. She whacked her leg on a low refrigerator door at work and it festered into a ulcer. She told me that she had gotten radiation therapy for the wound...... ?WTF?? Radiation for a skin ulcer????
Then she tells me they gave her a "Erythema dose" Erythema is reddening of the skin. So they did not know how much to give so they just zapped her till the skin turned red and stopped...... "Yeah bubba that's good enough"
Lots of bad things happen getting to good treatments...
m
These videos detail the history of glow-in-the-dark paints, with the second one longer and containing more detail, although I found the presenter's voice and hand motions quite annoying.
The Radium Girls
523,862 views
Apr 10, 2015
------------------------
Glowing in the Dark - The Radium Girls
666,816 views
Sept 3, 2017
I still have several old watches and clocks around that have those glowing numbers or just dots next to numbers.
KY..........
You could buy tubes of that glow-in-the-dark stuff for home "use". I remember my dad and I painting light switches in our house so we could see them in the dark. In a creative mood, we also painted stars over my and my brother's beds to see at night. Then we went our to our grandparents house and painted their switches and doorknobs so they could find the way into the bathroom at night.
Also, those shoe cabinets mentioned in a post. Buster Browns, I think. Thought it was cool to see your foot through that viewer. Wonder how it affected those shoe salesmen who had to peer into it god knows how many times a day, day after day, week after week.
