• Seasoned_Greetings@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Was listening to an American history podcast (the dollop) about the radium girls. They wore uranium infused lipstick because it glowed and they thought it was cute. They licked their fingers regularly to help apply uranium dust to things.

    While their male supervisors were wearing full lead suits totally for no reason and let those girls do that.

    Many of them lost their jaws. There was a suit filed that they won, but every single one of those girls died before they could collect the money.

    The suit led to a law establishing workers’ safety rights, so it wasn’t all bad. But that law was definitely written in those girls’ blood.

    • Drivebyhaiku@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      A decent amount of safety law was written in the blood or sweat of women. The origins of fire code come from the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire which manufactured garments in New York which was staffed almost entirely by women.

      Not to say a lot of safety law wasn’t developed because of the deaths of men but a bunch of women dying all at once due to negligence does seem to be a decently galvanizing force for society which makes it easier to get a ball rolling and women, particularly widows and family members of victims , have always been important advocates and organizers in the fight for safety legislation.

      • Lvxferre@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        They were women. Not minor female children.

        At least accordingly to this link, the trend for dial-painters was to be teenagers. Some started as early as their fourteens. It makes sense considering the 1920s, when adult women were expected to stay at home and take care of children, not to be part of the workforce. So odds are that “radium girls” is accurate, because most of them were not adult women.

        Wikipedia, and the sources that Wikipedia is relying on, are also rather consistently calling them “Radium girls”. This is clearly a fixed expression, that shouldn’t be decomposed like you’re doing.

        And even if we disregard both things above (we should not), your “small correction” boils down to “I’ll vomit an «ackshyually» to boss the other user around on language usage, disregarding what they say to whine about how they say it”. This is simply not contributive.