The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women

Throughout the book, scientific and medical tests are used to cast an appearance of neutrality and objectivity while in fact being used for highly biased and deceptive ends. In other cases, radium executives attacked the testing methodologies and personal credentials of properly conducted studies and the scientists running them. By maintaining an appearance of objectivity in their testing of the women, radium company executives maintained their public legitimacy as scientists and virtuous job providers, rather than deceitful manipulators intent on maintaining their profit margins.

Scientific evidence was manipulated repeatedly. For example, Dr. Flinn conducted medical tests on the dial-painters with a radon breath test, but he held the device far from the women’s mouths so the radium dissipated before it entered the device (Chapter 28). Flinn was also deceitful about his medical credentials—being perceived as a medical doctor gave him much more credibility as an arbiter of neutral facts, rather than a company puppet willing to lie and deceive on their behalf. Another example of manipulation is when Rufus Reed, the supervisor at the Ottawa plant, only selected some dial-painters for testing and denied Catherine Wolf the opportunity to be tested. Reed was intentionally biasing the data while maintaining the appearance of neutrality.