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Gender discrimination research in society
Gender discrimination research in society
Gender discrimination research in society
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The Radium Girls was the nickname given to hundreds of young women who worked in clock factories in the early 1900s in the U.S. and in Canada. The women painted and sold over 1,000,000 watch dials with a luminous radium paint to make them glow in the dark. The girls were referred to as the Ghost Girls in their time because they would physically shine at nighttime due to the radium on their skin from the factories. They also licked their paint brushes every time they picked them up after making a mark on the watch dials to make a finer tip on the brush. The ingestion of radium caused devastating side effects for the girls because of the gamma radiation that radium emits (Moore, 2017). Gamma radiation refers to gamma rays which can cause stochastic (random) health risks such as cancer. …show more content…
In the girls’ case, they started to see side effects such as aching teeth and sore mouths.
Eventually, after many doctors appointments, the girls were reported to have extremely weak jaws, and soon the doctors were able to lift the jaw out, not by an operation, but by merely pulling it out with bare hands. This problem eventually led to the death of many young women, and it has been said to have changed the US labor laws forever (Moore, 2017). Radium was originally intended to address health issues and it was thought to distribute fun, healthy, and popular products to consumers. However, radium should have been tested before it was applied to watch faces. Originally, nobody knew what was causing the weakening of bones in the women. However, the mystery of radium poisoning was eventually solved by scientists experiments and studies with radium. The issue of radium poisoning has been found all around the world and is a global issue. The effect that the girls, fighting for their lives, had on equal rights for women also plays a big role in today's society across the
world. In 1898, two French physicists, Marie and Pierre Curie discovered the new chemical element, radium (RA). It was quickly put to use as a cancer treatment (“The dark times of luminous watches,” 2017). Radium was and still is, used for cancer treatment because it functions similar to calcium. Calcium is a chemical element that goes through the bloodstream and directly to the bones where it is stored. It helps your body with the bone formation as well as muscle, nerve, and brain function (Hypercalcemia, 2017). For types of cancer like Osteosarcoma, the most common bone cancer, radium does the same thing as calcium in that it goes to the bone, but instead of helping the bone and body growth, it starts to eat it away which makes this a good way of targeting bone cancer cells. Cancer cells are more active than the normal bone cells which makes them more likely to pick up the radium. When the radium enters the bones and cancer cells, it releases its radiation. Radiation is the emission of energy as electromagnetic waves, which are more well known as radio waves, light waves, thermal radiation, x-ray, visible light, and microwaves. This radiation only travels a short distance, at just 2 to 10 cells deep which is a much smaller size compared to a millimeter. Some or most of the cancer cells will die, because of how small it is, while most of the normal, healthy bone cells are only slightly damaged (“General cancer information”, n.d.). Since this treatment caused little to no side effects, it was distributed to people all around the country and world just as any medication would be handed out today. Radium was very popular and used in many different products, from toothpaste, to food, to water products. It eventually got the nickname, “A cure for the living dead.” Even though everyone knew that radioactivity released energy, they didn't see how adding some radioactivity to their day to day tasks would be in any way harmful (“The dark times of luminous watches”, 2017). For many people, the overuse of radium caused a slow death, despite the current impression that is was beneficial to people’s lives. Below is an image showing what the jaws looked like when radium got into and affected the bone. https://www.buzzfeed.com/authorkatemoore/the-light-that-does-not-lie?utm_term=.csoZl22ak2#.fixreNNJMN Since the Radium Girls didn’t know why they were getting sick so fast and weren’t supported by the public or doctors, they decided to take action. Their community complained that the girls were only striving to gain attention in order to promote women's rights, while in reality, they were just trying to survive. "It is not for myself I care," Grace Fryer, one of the first Radium Girls affected commented. "I am thinking more of the hundreds of girls to whom this may serve as an example." (Moore, 2017). Grace lead the fight against society and her main goal at the beginning was to find a lawyer which was a very difficult task for a woman who was in such a harsh situation. She eventually found a lawyer but by that time, most of the girls’ lives were already running to an end. In 1938, the doctors found that “...Catherine Wolfe (Donohue after her marriage) developed a grapefruit-sized tumor that bulged on her hip. Like Mollie Maggia before her, she lost her teeth and had to pick pieces of her jawbone out of her mouth; she constantly held a patterned handkerchief to her jaw to absorb the ever-seeping pus. She had also seen her friends dying before her, and that rather steeled her spirit.” (Moore, 2017). When Catherine had started to fight for injustice, she and her friends were in the midst of the great depression. Due to this unfortunate timing and because they sued a law firm, they were shunned by the community. Since nobody believed their outrageous story of radium poisoning, Catherine decided to give evidence from her deathbed and, “...she finally won justice not only for herself, but for workers everywhere.” (Moore, 2017). Although the Radium Girls went through harsh and devastating conditions, the long-term outcome of the tragedy was very beneficial to women's rights and US labor laws. “The Radium Girls’ case was one of the first in which an employer was made responsible for the health of the company’s employees. It led to life-saving regulations and, ultimately, to the establishment of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration…” (Moore, 2017). OSHA operates nationally in the US to provide protection to workers. Before OSHA was taken to action, every year 14,000 people died on the job. Nowadays, there are just above 4,500 casualties in the workforce. The legacy the girls made to science has also been termed, “Invaluable.” (Moore, 2017). People will almost never hear of these women in current history textbooks, which is unfortunate because of how much these women impacted today’s US labor laws. While this factor of the Radium Girls is exciting and seems to have a happy ending, we must also take into consideration what was lost and how these girls were treated. The graph below shows the decrease in worker deaths in the US after the start of OSHA. https://www.democraticunderground.com/11171141 Mollie Maggia was the first woman who died from radium poisoning. She had quit work because she was so sick and didn’t know what was happening to her. At first, it was just an aching tooth which her doctor pulled out. That led to the next tooth aching and being pulled out and eventually the radium caused her limbs to ache to the point where she couldn’t walk. Doctors were confused, they thought it was rheumatism (any disease marked by inflammation and pain in the joints, muscles, or fibrous tissue, especially rheumatoid arthritis.). The doctor sent her home with only aspirin to deal with the pain (Moore, 2017). The doctors appeared to give minimal care and had little respect for what the girls were going through. This was a reflection of the brutal nature of life for women and lack of their human rights. In May 1922, Mollie was in intense pain and desperate for professional care. Most of her teeth were either gone or infected and her jaw was growing abnormally. After Mollie’s death, many other women passed away from similar symptoms, but it only caught the public's attention when a male employee of the radium firm died. It was then that scientists ran experiments and concluded that radium was causing bone weaknesses, illness, and death. These experiments included the boiling carnotite ores experiment. When carnotite ore (a radioactive mineral that consists of hydrated uranium potassium salt) is boiled with concentrated sulfuric acid, radium compounds get converted into bisulfates (a salt of sulfuric acid, containing the anion SO42− ) which is then separated from the insoluble components (unable to dissolve) with filtration. Filtration is the commonly used method of separating solids from liquids. The radium is received by the acid liquors diluting with water in which barium-radium sulfate is precipitated. Once it is precipitated, then the amount of radium can be measured to find if it was affecting the body. Experiments were conducted with both low, and high grade (determines how much of a mineral the ore is) carnotite ore to get more precise results. These results went towards finding the amounts of radium in the body (“Some Experiments on the Extraction of Radium with Concentrated Sulphuric Acid”, 1916) This, along with many other experiments, helped conclude that radium was a dangerous chemical to the human body. The Radium Girls are known worldwide for their dramatic story of courage and strength for what they endured. Their struggles helped change how society portrays women in the workplace and how we overlook the way chemicals are used in day to day events. If it weren't for their sacrifice, we might still live in a world with little control over the negative effects of chemicals such as radium. Even though the Radium Girls went through unimaginable pain and hardship, women might not have the same rights and respect as they do in today's society. In the future, we should take into consideration what new chemicals we are using. We should make sure to undergo the correct procedures of experimenting on them before using them.
In chapter 8 titled "Radium (Ra)" of The Poisoner's Handbook by Deborah Blum, the most interesting story developed within this chapter was the death of dial workers at Orange, New Jersey after been exposed to radium every day. It was interesting due to the fact that radium was used everywhere in the community and was never thought it could harm anyone. Radium was a super element that was used everywhere, but its continuous use unmasked its fatal habits. As it was stated in the text, "Radiant health, the ads proclaimed-beautiful skin, endless vigor, and eternal health—ingesting radium seemed the next best thing to drinking sunlight." (Blum 179). People were accepting radium as a natural gold element but they haven't realized constant contact
Brown took her time to interview people and look through archives to get the raw scenery of what happened behind closed doors. The third part was “The Plutonium Disasters.” She brought light to how dangerous it was to work and live there, and most of the people in the camp did not know how it can affect their body. Dr. Herbert Parker, the head of the Health Physics Division, “estimated there were eight hundred million flakes of [plutonium], which, if sucked into workers’ lungs or [ingested], could lodge in soft organs and remain in the body of years, a tiny time bomb that Parker feared would produce cancer” (Brown 166). This radioactive element that workers are producing is not just affecting the environment, but is also affecting the workers and their families. Brown has given an immense amount of evidence to explain to the readers how it affected so many of the workers’ health; she gives a vivid picture of how the radioactivity and particles of plutonium lingers in the air. The affects to the workers and their family ranges from cancerous cells to organ deterioration, when a pregnant woman is exposed to it, the health of her baby is also at risk. The fourth and last part of the book is “Dismantling the Plutonium Curtain,” this curtain is the curtain of secrecy. Brown interviewed people who lived in the camps as children and also people who worked there. Many of the people she
Granted that Catherine “won her case six times, for the Radium Dial Company appealed six times. After losing all six, the company appealed one last to the United States Supreme Courrt and finally the Illinois Industrial Commission awarded Catherine five thousand, six hundred, and sixty-one dollars” (Scene 20, p. 65). This case probably shed a new light to the countless of workers who probably had been affected by the radium. Moreover, assuming that the company eventually went bankrupt, it is not a stretch to say that injustice transformed to justice. Even if only by some measurable degree; by some tick of
This week’s reflection is on a book titled Girls Like Us and it is authored by Rachel Lloyd. The cover also says “fighting for a world where girls not for sale”. After reading that title I had a feeling this book was going to be about girls being prostituted at a young age and after reading prologue I sadly realized I was right in my prediction.
In 1917 a young female right out of high school started working at a radium factory in Orange, New Jersey. The job was mixing water, glue and radium powder for the task of painting watch dials, aircraft switches, and instrument dials. The paint is newly inventive and cool so without hesitation she paints her nails and lips with her friends all the while not knowing that this paint that is making them radiant, is slowly killing them. This was the life of Grace Fryer. Today there are trepidations on the topic of radiation from fears of nuclear fallout, meltdowns, or acts of terrorism. This uneasiness is a result of events over the past one hundred years showing the dangers of radiation. Although most accidents today leading to death from radiation poisoning occur from human error or faults in equipment, the incident involving the now named "radium girls" transpired from lack of public awareness and safety laws. (introduce topics of the paper)
The mission of Girls Inc, as stated on their website is, “to inspire all girls to be strong, smart and bold” (girlsinc.org, 2014). This mission statement can be seen on nearly every publication and public image, it has remained central to the organization, and it continues to be a driving force in the future of the organization. The vision of Girls Inc is “empowered girls and an equitable society,” (girlsinc.org). Girls Inc. has also developed a Girls Bill of Rights, which states that the girls have the right to: “1) be themselves and resist gender-stereotypes, 2) express themselves with originality and enthusiasm, 3) take risks, to strive freely, and to take pride in success, 4) accept and appreciate their bodies, 5) have confidence in themselves and to be safe in the world, and 6) prepare for interesting work and economic independence” (girlsinc.org).
... was overexposed to radioactivity never happened in real life. The film Fat Man and Little Boy showed great detail
... it has been established that chemicals in radioactivity cause cancer. Second, there is much evidence that many U.S civilians died from the effects of nuclear fall-out. Third, Williams’ family has no background of cancer until 1950s.
We have to emphasize the importance of memorizing certain names and formulas and some prefixes and suffixes that are used in building a system of nomenclature. From there on, it is a matter of applying the system to different names and formulas you meet. The summary all the ideas that will be presented in this essay help you to learn the nomenclature system.
The African American male community and colorism aren’t as affected by the judgement and abused as that of a women. Our community of African Americans are supposed to live in harmony because of everything that we have been through, For example, slavery, voting, etc... The African American male community to judge women on their skin shade, their looks, and their personality has my interiors aching. It has always been the male's job to raise a family by supplying the money to put food on the table not whether they're being mistreated by a shade of color. A woman is the one that is being put down by their shade of color and judged by how black they are compared to the rest of the world. It’s supposed to be the male's job to help the women out, but they’re the ones that judge and ridicule them the most.
There has been many arguments within history whether some bog bodies that have been discovered were in fact murder opposed to the much idolodiesed idea of a sacrifice. However, could the bodies actually suggest a sacrifice opposed to murder? Yde Girl, a young 16 year old girl whom was founded in the Stijifveen peat bog near a village called Yde, is a body that has been identified as a much suspicious death and one, that has brought much controversy debates within history.
Uranium, a radioactive element, was first mined in the western United States in 1871 by Dr. Richard Pierce, who shipped 200 pounds of pitchblende to London from the Central City Mining District. This element is sorta boring but I found something interesting, they used it to make an an atomic bomb in the Cold War. In 1898 Pierre and Marie Curie and G. Bemont isolated the "miracle element" radium from pitchblende. That same year, uranium, vanadium and radium were found to exist in carnotite, a mineral containing colorful red and yellow ores that had been used as body paint by early Navajo and Ute Indians on the Colorado Plateau. The discovery triggered a small prospecting boom in southeastern Utah, and radium mines in Grand and San Juan counties became a major source of ore for the Curies. It was not the Curies but a British team working in Canada which was the first to understand that the presence of polonium and radium in pitchblende was not due to simple geological and mineral reasons, but that these elements were directly linked to uranium by a process of natural radioactive transmutation. The theory of radioactive transformation of elements was brilliantly enlarge in1901 by the New Zealand physicist Ernest Rutherford and the English chemist Frederick Soddy at McGill University in Montreal. At dusk on the evening of November 8, 1895, Wilhelm Rontgen, professor of physics at the University of Wurzburg in Germany, noticed a cathode tube that a sheet of paper come distance away. He put his hand between the tube and the paper, he saw the image of the bones in his hand on the paper.
The Radium Girls brought light to the effects of radium and the neglect rights of workers
...S make amends for human radiation experiments." JAMA. v274, n12. September 27, 1995. pp. 933.
The impact of nuclear power on the modern world has improved Various sectors of the economy and society .i.e. Food and Agriculture, Insect control, Food Preservation, Water Resources, Military, Medicine, Research and Industry. “In 1911 George de Hevesy conducted the first application of a radioisotope. At the time de Hevesy was a young Hungarian student working in Manchester with naturally radioactive materials. Not having much money he lived in modest accommodation and took his meals with his landlady. He began to suspect that some of the meals that appeared regularly might be made from leftovers from the preceding days or even weeks, but he could never be sure. To try and confirm his suspicions de Hevesy put a small amount of radioactive material into the remains of a meal. Several days later when the same dish was served again he used a simple radiation detection instrument - a gold leaf electroscope - to check if the food was radioactive. It was, and de Hevesy's suspicions were confirmed.