Delighted to welcome Samantha Wilcoxson to my blog today. Samantha is a history enthusiast and avid traveler. Her published works include the Plantagenet Embers series with novels and novellas that explore the Wars of the Roses and early Tudor era. Luminous is her first foray into 20th century American history, but she suspects that it will not be her last. Samantha enjoys exploring the personal side of historic events and creating emotive, inspiring stories.
The Society of
the Living Dead
By Samantha
Wilcoxson
In the years
following World War I, Radium Dial was one of the best places for working-class
girls of Ottawa, Illinois to earn good wages to help support their family or
set savings aside for when they were married. Little did those girls know that
the material they used to paint watch and instrument dials was slowly poisoning
them. Even when realization dawned, they were faced with opposition from the
radium industry, which did not wish to see their profits disappear, and the
medical community, which had been using radium as a miracle cure. One group of
dial painters decided they did not want to see future workers suffer their
fate, so they decided to form the Society of the Living Dead.
Pearl Payne took
the lead on forming the shockingly named organization. She worked at Radium
Dial for less than a year, but she suffered health problems for the rest of her
life that she attributed to radium poisoning. Along with coworkers, Catherine
Donohue, Marie Rossiter, and Charlotte Purcell, Pearl convinced their lawyer,
Leonard Grossman, that they needed to do more than win their own case against
Radium Dial. They wanted to “band together, secure legal aid and in general use
our organized presence to simplify, promote, and improve the laws relative to
those who are maimed due to occupational hazards.”
The called
themselves the Society of the Living Dead because some victims of radium
poisoning had the eerie appearance of walking corpses. Charlotte Purcell had an
arm amputated, and Catherine Donohue’s body wasted away to less than half of
her healthy weight. Other women grew giant tumors or had their jaws and noses
rot away. The varied symptoms of radium poisoning was one of the factors that
made it difficult to diagnose and hold employers responsible.
The Society got
the attention of the press and used it to spread awareness of the struggle of
the “radium girls,” as they came to be known. Even the women who did not enjoy
being the center attention allowed media photos of their emaciated bodies and
underdeveloped children to increase sympathy and action. The news stories
requested that readers send funds to help support the disabled workers whose
families were struggling with medical bills and loss of wages.
Leonard Grossman
was vital to the success of the women’s legal cases and the Society’s success
at raising awareness. “You hear the voice of the Society of the Living Dead.
That is the voice of the ghost women speaking not only here in this room but to
the world. This voice is going to strike the shackles off the industrial slaves
of America,” he stated in one interview. The women could not have succeeded
without his tireless efforts and countless hours of free legal work.
As the former
dial painters sickened and died, Radium Dial and other companies in the radium
industry fought to deny liability or even the idea that radium might be causing
their health problems. Without the work of the Society of the Living Dead, the
fight to see radium poisoning recognized as an occupational hazard might have
taken years longer. These women’s quest to protect others from the harm they
had suffered saved countless lives, even as they lost their own.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
My new book, Luminous,
tells the story of Catherine Donohue, one of the key members of the Society of
the Living Dead. Photos of her shrinking frame and her tiny children inspired
sympathy and increased awareness across the country, but there is much more to
her than those media photos and news stories. Her private struggle is what I
strive to capture in Luminous. What did it feel like to fight for your
life when even the medical community seemed to be an enemy? How did she cope
with watching her health fail at the time of her life that should have been
filled with health and happiness? How did a quiet Catholic girl stand up to the
might of the radium industry? Find out in Luminous: The Story of a Radium
Girl. To read it click here: mybook.to/luminous
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