101 young women in Ottawa to paint these dials with a radium-based paint. They were taught to use a camel hair brush that they “lip pointed” meaning they used their lips and tongue to swirl the brush to a finer point.6 As Catherine Wolfe Donohue said, “Miss Lottie Murray taught us how to point camel-hair brushes with our tongues. We would first dip the brush into the water, then into the powder, and then point the ends of the bristles between our teeth.”7 They were told that this was a perfectly safe practice, but it was not. Charlotte Nevins recounted these lies saying, “When I was working in the plant they always told me the radium would never hurt me. They even encouraged us to paint rings on our fingers and paint our dress buttons and buckles.”8 The human body treats radium like calcium, depositing it into the bones. Eventually, if enough radium is ingested, it begins to break down the body from the inside out.6 The company ignored these dangers and continued to produce dials with radium paint. The operation of this radium painting factory in Ottawa Illinois caused both devastation to the employees and long-lasting environmental damage that still affects citizens of Ottawa today. The health effects of radium ingestion soon manifested in the girls. Their bones began to erode and fall apart, they began to sprout tumors, they became severely anemic, and they lost much of the structural integrity in their bones. One girl, Peg Looney, had bits of her jawbone fall out of her mouth and became too weak to even walk. Others had massive jaw tumors that grew as big as their heads. They all began to lose weight and strength and soon most were bedridden. One of the girls, Catherine Donohue, ended up weighing sixty pounds towards the end of her 6 “Washington State University,” U.S. Transuranium and Uranium Registries (Washington State University), accessed December 21, 2022, https://ustur.wsu.edu/radium-studies/. 7 Dan Klefstad, “Ottawa's 'Radium Girls' at Forefront of Worker Protections,” Northern Public Radio: WNIJ and WNIU (Northern Public Radio, May 22, 2017), https://www.northernpublicradio.org/illinois/2017-05-18/ottawasradium-girls-at-forefront-of-worker-protections. 8 Kate Moore, The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women (Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, 2018).
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