In the 1920s, hundreds of young women had the most glamorous job in America: painting glow-in-the-dark watch dials with radium paint at factories in New Jersey and Illinois. The work paid well, and the radium made them shine. Literally. The girls would paint their nails, teeth, and faces with the glowing substance for fun. They'd return home from work glowing like ghosts in the dark. Their employers told them radium was completely safe, even healthy. They were instructed to lick their paintbrushes to keep the tips sharp, ingesting radium with every stroke. "Lip, dip, paint" became their death sentence.

Within a few years, the radium girls started dying in horrific ways. Their jaws rotted and fell off. Their bones became so brittle they'd crumble at a touch. Tumors consumed their bodies. Their mouths glowed with radiation even as they lay dying. When they tried to sue, the companies denied everything, hired doctors to lie, stalled in court for years, and watched the women die one by one. But five New Jersey women, led by Grace Fryer, refused to give up. Their fight against US Radium Corporation became one of the most important labor cases in American history.

Join us as we tell the story of the radium girls who literally glowed in the dark, the corporations that knowingly poisoned them, and the lawsuit that changed worker safety laws forever. Their bones are still radioactive today.

Keywords: Radium Girls, radium poisoning, US Radium Corporation, Grace Fryer, glow in the dark, radium paint, worker safety, labor rights, 1920s factories, occupational hazards, radium dial painters, corporate negligence, radioactive poisoning, women's labor history, deadly jobs, radium girls lawsuit