Celebrating the 'Radium Girls' and Working Women Who Fought for Their Rights [View all]

March is Women's History Month, a time when Americans remember the courage and commitment of women the world over.

Mar. 25 is a grim anniversary during this month of remembrance. On that date in 1911, a fire broke out at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in New York City. Inside the building, laboring under sweatshop conditions, female garment workers were trapped by locked doors that blocked their attempts to flee the burning factory. Of the hundreds of young women working in the factory, only a few survived. New York and the nation were horrified at the death toll of 146 women killed in the fire. Most were Italian immigrants or European Jews trying to make a new home in America. Dozens jumped to their deaths from the windows of the 10th floor garment workshop.

The infamous Triangle Fire underlined the concerns of the labor movement at the time that workers were expendable in a corporate world that would place profits above the lives of people. The corpses of scores of young women lying blackened and bloodied on the sidewalks of New York were mute testimony to the long and ongoing campaign for economic justice and safety in the workplace being waged by the labor movement in America in 1911. They were martyrs to a cause that still is relevant today in America and around the world.

Just a few years later, the issue of the health and safety of women in the workplace would again make headlines across this nation and around the globe. During and after World War I, hundreds of women were employed at companies in Illinois and New Jersey that used radium, a radioactive element. The United States Radium Corporation and the Radium Dial Company had profitable military contracts to provide luminous dials for airplanes, tanks, ships and the watches worn by soldiers. The pay was good, the working conditions were friendly, and the soft glow in the dark emanating from the women's hair, skin and clothing was looked upon almost as a status symbol by the working class girls and women who could afford the latest fashions because of their jobs at the radium facilities.

Read more: https://flagpole.com/news/street-scribe/2020/03/04/celebrating-the-radium-girls-and-working-women-who-fought-for-their-rights
(Athens, Georgia Flagpole)