Grace Fryer | Women of History

Grace Fryer’s life and death were instrumental in shaping occupational labor laws. As one of the Radium Girls, she changed the way companies treated their employees in a precedent-setting case. This is the incredible story of Grace Fryer, the subject of this edition of Women of History.

Grace Fryer was born in 1899 in Orange, New Jersey; her father was a union representative. As she got older, Grace became very opinionated on a number of issues, including speaking publicly about her enthusiasm for voting.

Grace, along with about seventy other women, was hired by the United States Radium Corporation to paint watch faces with radium. The brush strokes were so intricate that the U.S. Radium supervisors encouraged their workers to point the brushes with their lips between each brush stroke (calling the method "lip, dip, paint"); the idea was to keep the brush in a sharp point to allow for tiny detail work. Owners of the company, and the scientists familiar with the effects of radium, carefully avoided any exposure to it themselves, but workers were not told that it was dangerous. In fact, it was considered common for workers to paint their nails, teeth, and faces to make them glow for fun.

Over time, the symptoms began. Workers began to experience dental pain, loose teeth, lesions, and ulcers. The symptoms got worse and began to include anemia, bone fractures, and necrosis of the jaw. In 1923, the first dial worker died; within a year, a dozen more were dead and another fifty had become ill. Radium exposure was discussed as a possible cause, (especially after the death of Dr. Sabin A. Von Sochocky, the inventor of radium dial paint, in 1928), but U.S. Radium and other watch-dial companies rejected claims that the afflicted workers were suffering from exposure to radium. They convinced doctors, dentists, and other medical professionals to lie when declaring cause of death, often citing syphilis as a cause in an attempt to harm the reputations of the dead women. The company allowed workers to continue in their jobs without adding any protective equipment or changing their methods whatsoever.

This trend of workers getting sicker and the company doing nothing enraged Grace. Eventually, fed up with the inaction of U.S. Radium and companies like it, she convinced four other women -- Edna Hussman, Katherine Schaub, Quinta McDonald, and Albina Larice -- collectively called "The Radium Girls" -- to join her in suing the company. Grace wanted U.S. Radium to take responsibility for the illnesses of its workers, pay medical bills for those it had impacted, and implement safety measures to prevent exposure in the future.

It took Grace over two years to find a lawyer that was willing to take the Radium Girls case to court. By the time the case was heard, two of the Radium Girls were bedridden; none of them were strong enough to raise their right hand to take the oath before testifying. After the case went all the way to the Supreme Court, (the case was won eight times but kept getting appealed) Grace and the others won their lawsuit in 1939, and U.S. Radium was found responsible for their radium poisoning.

The Radium Girls were each paid $10,000 (about $151,000 today) in damages, and both their legal and medical expenses were paid by the company. From this case, the right of individual workers to sue for damages from corporations due to labor abuse was established. The lawsuit and resulting publicity was a factor in the establishment of occupational disease labor law. From then on, radium dial painters were given protective gear and education on the dangers of exposure; they no longer used the “lip, dip, paint” method, and avoided ingesting or breathing the paint.

Grace Fryer died in October of 1933. Her body, and the bodies of the other U.S Radium workers, still glow today -- the half-life of radium is about 1,600 years.

Due to the Radium Girls case, the Center for Human Radiobiology was established at Argonne National Laboratory in 1968.

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SOURCES

The Radium Girls by Kate Moore

My Favorite Murder podcast - Episode 190, "Lick The Clock"

The Radium Girls: http://theradiumgirls.com/the-girls/4593781028

HistoryNet - Glow In The Dark Tragedy: https://www.historynet.com/glow-dark-tragedy.htm

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_Girls