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کتاب: دختران رادیوم / فصل 59

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POSTSCRIPT

“We girls,” said one worker, “would sit around big tables, laughing and talking and painting. It was fun to work there.”1

“I felt lucky to have a job there,” revealed another girl. “The job paid top dollar for women in this area. All of us got along real good.”2

“We slapped the radium around like cake frosting.”3

The women wore smocks, washed once a week amidst the family laundry. They drank open cans of soda through their shifts, sourced from the machine in their studio. They worked with bare hands and painted their fingernails with the material “for kicks”4; they were allowed to take radium home to practice painting.

There was radium everywhere in the plant—and outside on the sidewalk. Contaminated rags piled up in the workrooms or were burned outside in the yard; radioactive waste was emptied into the toilet of the men’s washroom; ventilation shafts discharged above a nearby children’s play area. The women didn’t clean their shoes before they left work, so they walked the radium all over town. Employees recalled that you couldn’t work in the plant without getting covered with the stuff: “I’d come home from work at night and look in the mirror and see little specks of it glowing in my hair,”5 recalled one dial-painter. The women’s hands would bleed as they tried to scrub away the supernatural shine.

“The company,” said one girl, “always led us to believe everything was under control and safe, but I don’t think they cared.”6

She was right. Before too long, the workers started suffering. “I had to have a mouth operation,” said one, “but now my teeth are so loosened that they are probably all going to fall out… I have a blood disease I can’t seem to get rid of.”7 The women noticed tumors appearing on their feet, their breasts, their legs. One woman recalled that the doctors kept cutting off parts of her colleague’s leg, bit by bit by bit…until finally there was nothing more left to amputate. Ruth, the colleague, eventually died.

The women went to their supervisor, worried sick. “A man from the New York headquarters came out here,” a radium girl remembered, “and told us [our work] wouldn’t hurt us.”8

“Breast cancer,” said the executive, “is thought to be a hormonal problem, not a radioactivity hazard.”9

But he was mistaken. A national cancer-institute specialist observed that the link between breast cancer and radiation was one of the best-established relationships around.

The executive continued to bluster: “The plant manager isn’t entirely to blame. Employees are responsible for safety too.”10

But there were no warning signs in the workrooms. The women had been told that, as long as they didn’t lip-point, they would be perfectly safe.

These women worked in a little town called Ottawa, Illinois. These women worked for Joseph Kelly’s firm, Luminous Processes.

The year was 1978.

The original radium girls were indeed Cassandra-like in their powers; and just like Cassandra, their prophecies were not always listened to. Safety standards only keep you safe if the companies you work for use them. Concerns had been raised about the Ottawa plant for decades, but it wasn’t until February 17, 1978, that the dangerous studio was finally shut down: inspectors found radiation levels were 1,666 times higher than was safe. The abandoned building became something of a bogeyman for Ottawa residents, who became afraid to walk or even drive past it; it was graffitied with the slogan: DIAL LUMINOUS FOR DEATH.

“A lot of us are dead,”11 one LP dial-painter stated bluntly. Of a hundred workers she mentioned, sixty-five had died; the cancer rate was twice as high as normal.

Yet Luminous Processes was unapologetic. It wriggled out of paying cleanup costs, contributing approximately $62,000 ($147,500) to the multimillion-dollar bill, while executives used “doubletalk”12 to put off the women when they demanded answers. Workers were offered just $100 ($363) in severance pay and had difficulty suing the firm. “They didn’t have any respect for the health of the girls,” one LP worker spat. “They were just interested in getting the work out.”13

“Luminous Processes,” declared the local paper, “seems to put profits before people.”14

How quickly we forget.

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