Radium Girls Play

On Saturday, October 28, I went to watch the play, Radium Girls, performed by high school students from Serra High School, Notre Dame High School, and Mercy High School. The play was about the radium girls who worked in radium factories painting watches with glowing paint in the 1920’s. Radium was a valued substance because it was believed that radium could cure diseases like cancer as well as restore vitality in older people. Radium was highly advertised and Americans were enticed by the strange new element.

The young girls who worked in these radium factories were well paid, receiving higher than average salaries. However, the effects of working in such close vicinity with radium eventually appeared. Symptoms of radium poisoning started showing up, but doctors didn’t know the cause. Radium is a radioactive element, meaning that it can damage tissue. Exposure to radium is extremely dangerous and damages the body. The girls developed tooth decay, chronic exhaustion, headaches, and infections. In the play, a doctor who worked with radium also experienced symptoms of radium exposure. His fingers turned black from tissue damage from radiation.

One radium girl, Grace, discovered that the root of her sickness was the radium factory since many of her old coworkers died or fell ill too. Despite her quickly failing health, she pushed through with a lawsuit against the radium company, which was worth millions of dollars and was very powerful. In this fight for recompensation, Grace had to persevere despite financial issues and urges from her fiancé and her mother to quit the fight and just take the settlement money. Grace found herself fighting against both the powerful company and those around her. Her mother and fiancé didn’t support her determination. In the end, the radium company gave up the fight and gave Grace and the other radium girls large sums of money and agreed to pay their medical expenses for the rest of their lives.

Watch this video by Hank Green for more background and information about the radium girls!

This play expressed the human and emotional side of this event in history. It can be easy to dehumanize the people involved in this event and see the sides as either good or bad. However, this play was able to make the audience see the personal lives of both Grace and the head of the radium company. Grace was a young girl with potential whose life was cut short by her sickness from the radium exposure. She had a fiancé and was planning on starting a family and buying a house. Meanwhile, Mr. Roeder, the head of the radium company, seemed coldhearted but was not a malignant man and was just acting out of ambition. He just wanted to succeed to be able to support his wife and kid. Throughout the play, Mr. Roeder is inflicted by guilt and indecision. He feels sorry for the girls but isn’t willing to give up his company for them. He continuously tries to depersonalize the girls and not think of them as individual people to ease his guilt.  At the end of the play, many years after the court case, Mr. Roeder sees Grace in the cemetery and reflects about his decisions. He said that he remembers everything from that time except the girls’ faces. He exchanges a look with Grace and finally manages to come to terms with what happened.

This performance was very powerful and emotional for me. After the play was over, I was left pondering about it. The story of the radium girls itself was interesting, but the personalization of the characters really made the event impactful. This play also brought into light how unpredictable science can be. Everyone in the U.S., including prominent scientists, thought that radium was a miracle element that couldn’t possibly be dangerous, but they were wrong.

Works Cited

“The Radium Girls.” Performance by Hank Green, The Radium Girls, SciShow, 10 Apr. 2015, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaIqlW6VcMY.

“The Radium Girls – Still Glowing in Their Coffins.” The Spectator, 8 May 2017, http://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/06/the-radium-girls-still-glowing-in-their-coffins/.