Talk:Radium Girls

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[edit] Radium Dial Company

SVDasein (talk) —Preceding comment was added at 07:46, 13 December 2007 (UTC)


[edit] The term "Radium Girls"

You make some good points but there are several places besides Ottawa where this happened, and even additional documentaries. For example, US Public Television some years ago showed one called "Radium City." It dealt mostly with radium dial painting in a Chicago suburb that continued well into the 1960s. It was made in the late 1980s , I think, and had interviews with "survivors" as well as very old footage from the 1920s showing painters actually doing that work (in New York state).
This article is about a particular set of painters in New Jersey. We could either leave it as is and start a separate, more general one on radium painting, or we could turn this one into a more general article (and also change its name). Anyone have any preferences? Pzavon (talk) 04:16, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

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I think it might be the case that the Chicago suburb you're referring to is in fact Ottawa. The film "Radium City" is almost exclusively about Ottawa IL (see the NYT article above).
My reasoning behind the notion of including Ottawa's experience in this article is due to what may be some confusion on my part: I got the impression that the book "Radium Girls" was the inspiration for this article's title. While I've only skimmed the book and read summaries/reviews, I've gotten the sense that the book's use of the term is not restricted to the New Jersey women but rather refers to the aggregate of the women performing the work throughout the U.S. I've not turned up anything thus far suggesting that the term "Radium Girls" is commonly used as a proper noun referring exclusively to a group of people in New Jersey. If there's some reference indicating otherwise then I stand corrected. The book is available online to some extent here: http://books.google.com/books?id=onC4lpI5_RkC&printsec=frontcover ( If you search for Ottawa, you'll find the term occurs throughout the book, and you can read some of the references ) SVDasein (talk) —Preceding comment was added at 08:38, 15 December 2007 (UTC)
Ok - I think I see what you're getting at: Several of the instances of the phrase "Radium Girls" in the article are referent to a colloquialism that was applied to five women involved in a lawsuit against US Radium Corp. in NJ. The *book* "Radium Girls : Women and Industrial Health Reform" by Claudia Clark uses the term in a more general sense. My confusion arises from the fact that this article relies on both senses of the term - the specific and the general - somewhat interchangably. Perhaps the article should explore *both* senses explicitly? SVDasein (talk) 09:29, 15 December 2007 (UTC)
I hate to beat what appears to be a dead horse, but I've not lost the sense that the term "Radium Girls" has a widely used broader meaning. Witness these google results. Is it worth stating that the article describes a subset of individuals who can justifiably said to be included in the group of people delineated by the moniker "Radium Girls"? As it stands I feel the article may be paying homage to the root of an implied etymological evolution rather than the group of people it actually describes, and I can't help thinking that the larger phenomena is more important. SVDasein (talk) 04:23, 22 January 2008 (UTC)
Radium and Uranium are two very different things. Radium paint was used to paint dials for see-in-the-dark use. Uranium was not used in that way. There is no broader category called "Uranium Girls." The group designated "Radium Girls" are specifically defined by a ciscumstance in Illinois and are actually a subset of the larger phenomenon called "Radium Dial Painters" who had members/victims in New Jersey and New York as well as Illinois and elsewhere. I would agree that this article might be retitled and reworked to address the entire Radium Dial Painter experience, or it might be pruned to focus more clearly only the movie based on the Illinois experience and using that title, leaving the rest for a broader article on radium dial painting generally. Pzavon (talk) 03:30, 23 January 2008 (UTC)
My use of the word "Uranium" was a mistake - I meant Radium (corrected above) 69.60.123.206 (talk) 09:10, 25 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Correct data on closure in 1978???

Please can you locate the exact closure date_I'm pretty sure it was not as late as 1978-please locate the correct date as this is reallly interesting. For a company to last that long hurting people-belies reason.--Read-write-services (talk) 01:53, 14 December 2007 (UTC) ==
Yes it's mind bending, but it's true: http://www.epa.gov/R5Super/npl/illinois/ILD980606750.htm I actually spent about six months in Ottawa in the mid 1980s. During that time I never ran into anyone or anything that gave any mention or indication of the hazards around the city (aside from the unexplained cement domes one encounters when leaving town). If you watch the documentary I refer to (above) you'll find yourself dumbfounded through the vast majority of it - the citizenry was as far as I can tell just basically blind to it for decades. SVDasein (talk) 09:00, 15 December 2007 (UTC)
Additional references:
The second article notes that "tip wetting" ended in 1926. SVDasein (talk) 09:41, 15 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Edit

"rv: perhaps a well meaning edit, but the spice of relevant and hearty context sure beats politically correct historical revisionism any day"

My intent was hardly "historical revisionism"! The reason I changed the statment "In a chilling prelude to the atomic bomb radiation unleashed by the United States during World War II, the U.S. Radium Corporation hired some 70 women to perform..." is because it SOUNDS poorly worded. "the atomic bomb radiation released during WWII" is miniscule compared to the amount of fallout released by the thousands of nuclear weapons detonated by both superpowers in the decades afterward. This is a time more aptly encompassed by the term "atomic age". Furthermore the sentance seems to draw an implicit connection between the radium corporation's negligence and the US Gov.'s nuclear ambitions and that's just silly.--Deglr6328 17:28, 16 Jun 2005 (UTC)
  • Thanks for adding clarity to your initially terse explanation. The rhetorical jungle of Wikiedit summaries is rife with accusations of ad hominem attacks, an issue that could, hopefully, be tabled without need for further attention. Attending to content, the initial bombing was 'a shot heard round the world', climaxing the rush to harness radiation a bit more effectively than merely lighting up watch faces. While nuclear testing and atomic energy waste have drenched the likes of Chernobl in radioactivity, such manifestations of the atomic age pale somewhat when comparison is made to the attention given to the Hiroshima bombing. So, yes, the wording may need revision, or perhaps deletion as you suggest, but the inherent dangers of harnessing radiation were not handled well by US Radium then, just as case remains with nuclear waste and atomic bomb tests today. As a historical matter concerning the risk management of radioactive materials, simply referencing the atomic age does not seem to do justice, within the article, to the significance of labor abuse by military contractors. Ombudsman 20:18, 16 Jun 2005 (UTC)
ok I can agree with most of that, I just don't like the comcept of comparing the Ra girl "incident" in which negligence (and some ignorance?) was at fault for the harm induced in the workers at the factory to a act which purposely resulted in the obliteration of tens of thousands of lives during a war.... What about what I have added now: "In what may be seen as a chilling prelude to the use of nuclear weaponry and the atomic age as a whole, in which lack of concern for exposure to radiological hazards was at times endemic; the Radium Girl episode holds an important place in the history of both the progression of the field of health physics and of the labor rights movement."?--Deglr6328 06:28, 17 Jun 2005 (UTC)


I have a problem with the quote

"sometimes to surprise their boyfriends when the lights went out."

First, given the percentage of homosexuals in society and the number of radium girls (10%) clearly 7 'radium girls' were homosexual. Clearly, they did not paint their nails or teeth for a boyfriend. The 7 'radium dykes' demand representation.

Second, there is no sitation at all that substantiates that any 'radium girl' colored her teeth or her nails. I want a sitation.

Without the necessary sitations the quote smacks of sexism.

tony

The above text was added on 1 Dec 2007 by 24.12.122.181

[edit] request citation

I added a request for a citation to the statement "industrial safety standards were demonstrably enhanced for many decades." This seems to imply that standard may have been loosened in recent decades, or it could mean nothing much at all. At any rate, a citation of a real quote of what this lawsuit meant would be clearer. 64.252.85.0 (talk) 20:27, 24 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Other Incidents of this nature

There must somewhere be other records of this sort of thing. Most of the aircraft used in WWII had instruments whose dials had been painted in luminous paint, often using radium based paints. I was aware of a factory in Clerkenwell in London probably used for this purpose at some time in the past. When we came across this in 1990 the building was in use as a wine warehouse, but there was an awful lot of radiation in the building when an analysis was done. Most of this building was decontaminated and the waste removed to UKAEA at Harwell. Soarhead77 (talk) 12:30, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

Take a look at the "Radium Dial Painters" data set at http://cedr.lbl.gov/ for an indication of the extent of this problem. There is also an interesting summary at http://www.rerowland.com/dial_painters.htm that might be a good source for expanding and generalizing this article. A google search on "radium dial painters" brings up several additional items. Pzavon (talk) 02:39, 23 February 2008 (UTC)
Thanks for those links - very useful. Soarhead77 (talk) 15:43, 27 February 2008 (UTC)