The Radium Girls were female factory workers who contracted radiation poisoning from painting watch dials with self-luminous paint. Painting was done by women at three different sites in the United States, and the term now applies to the women working at the facilities: the first, a United States Radium factory in Orange, New Jersey, beginning around 1917; the facility at Ottawa, Illinois, beginning in the early 1920s; and a third facility in Waterbury, Connecticut.
The women in each facility had been told the paint was harmless, and subsequently ingested deadly amounts of radium after bein...