![]() I’m here because I haven’t been able to get their story out of my head. ![]() I’ve driven 250 miles to be here, the closest I can get to these women, who died decades before I was born and who were poisoned, horrifically and knowingly, by their employer. It’s a perfect summer day in Ottawa, Illinois and I’m standing in a leafy country cemetery, wondering if the bones of the women buried beneath my feet are radioactive. Wanting to hear more about how Radiant Dial's treatment of these women affected the town itself, Anne traveled to Ottawa to hear firsthand what happened to the women and their families in the years that followed.Ī version of this essay was also published on Medium. ![]() Writer Kate Moore tells their story in “The Radium Girls.” She told Anne Strainchamps she could not stop thinking about the girls. So the young women fought back, in court. The companies refused to do anything about it. The young women got horribly and gruesomely sick. All day they would press them between their lips to keep them sharp. It was delicate work, and radium-dial factories hired young women to do it. But back in the early 1900s, there was only one way to make a clock glow in the dark-painting the numbers with radium. We take for granted how easily we can read the time in darkness.
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