Play About The Radium Girls Shines At Community College

Radium silk, radium water, radium cigarettes, radium glassware and radium spray were all products inspired by the radium craze of the 1920s and early ’30s, when radium was said to cure everything from cancer to constipation.

Despite knowing that ingesting radium was dangerous, the Radium Dial Company encouraged its workers, mostly young women, to use the “lip, dip, paint” method of putting a paint brush in one's mouth to get a pointy tip, then dipping it in radium dust and painting clock and watch numbers so they would glow in the dark. The women who held those jobs were ultimately poisoned by the radium they accidentally injected at work. Their health fears were ignored by company doctors and many were eventually fired, ironically, for taking too many sick days. Wanting to be seen, the w