Radium girls and their search for justice and dignity

possibilities for historical approaches for science teaching

Abstract

In the first decades of the 20th century several commercial products were launched that included the use of radioactivity, such as the glow-in-the-dark watches, which were very successful. Young female workers who worked on the production line of these objects fell ill, and then led a struggle for correct diagnoses, medical treatment, and laborcompensation. The United States Radium Corporation (USRC) of New Jersey (USA) hires a physician to defend the use of radium in the industry, who also distributed tests with false negatives to several women. The report of this historical episode is guided by the historiographic practice that seeks a contextualized interpretation of primary and secondary sources, recognizing that the writing of history is not neutral. It assumes a position of denouncing injustices and a non-neutral narrative on gender and social class issues. The narrative offers possibilities to combine historical approaches to science and discussions in Science, Technology, and Society in teacher training, exemplifying conceptual, technological, ethical, and economic issues, among other aspects of the context’s scientific and social practices. This approach also allows for discussions on the nature of sciences from the perspective of education for human rights and ethics of cordial reason, making explicit injustices arising from economic inequalities and imbalances between social forces such as those that caused the lack of support for those women.