short essay for speaking skill on radium girls for 370 words
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Answer:
370 words is very i can write.
Explanation:
But it will take very time sryyyyyyyy???
Eighty women sit in a large room full of long tables. Sunbeams slanting in through the open windows illuminate a cheerful scene. The women are intent on their work, carefully dipping their paintbrushes into a glowing pale green paint and tracing the dial number on a watch. Every few strokes a woman raises her paintbrush to her lips to bring it to a point for more precision. They talk quietly amongst themselves. One woman jokingly paints her fingernails with the luminous paint and laughs. These women believe that they are lucky: they have a secure job with relatively high pay.
Unbeknownst to them, every time they place the brush between their lips, they deposit radioactive radium into their bodies. Today, we know that their futures will not be easy. Within a year or two many women will develop tumors and then be painfully killed by the radium poison. When they seek the aid of the company that they painted for they will be turned down, left to fend for themselves.
These women worked in factories in New Jersey, Connecticut, and Illinois. Several brave women chose to stand up, and sue the company. They were called the Radium Girls. Their story is not well known, and it raises many questions. Why were the women not warned of the dangers of radium? How did the company mislead them? How did set in motion a chain of laws that changed occupational health as we know it? To fully understand the tragedy of the Radium Girl’s story one must learn the conditions during the 1920s, delve into the stories of the young women and explore their fight for compensation. Only then can one realize the full extent of the Radium Girl’s impact on occupational health.
Background
In the 1900’s, industrial diseases were all too common. Workers were so used to these diseases that they spoke about them with colloquial nicknames. People who made hats got sick from mercury poisoning, and this was called “hatters shakes”. “Painter’s colic” was a disease housepainters would get from working with lead paint. “Brass founder’s ague” struck brass founders when they breathed metal oxide fumes. Diseases caused by work were an accepted fact of life. In 1914, three million of the 34 million workers in America were documented as being sick from industrial poisoning. The problem of industrial diseases only worsened over time as American production demands increased. (Clark, 19-22)
With the outbreak of World War I, even more chemicals were introduced to American workers. There were shortages of chemicals formally purchased from Germany, so American industry started to produce more of these chemicals. For example, American plants now manufactured ingredients such as benzene to make explosives. When exposed to many small amounts of benzene over time, workers became anemic and suffered from repressed respiration. Companies prepared for peacetime by finding other uses for the chemicals they made. After the war, benzene was used in paints, rubber, shoes, gasoline, and dry cleaning. This meant that many more workers than ever before were exposed to this toxic chemical compound. In New Jersey, many workers were exposed to benzene through rubber. (Clark, 21- 22)
Unfortunately, benzene poisoning was not the only toxin that people in New Jersey had to worry about. Dr. Henry Kessler, a doctor in the New Jersey said, “The area within a twenty-five mile radius of Newark is the most important area in the world from the stand-point of occupational health hazards.” He was referring to the three industrial poisoning episodes that occurred in New Jersey, in the 1920’s alone. The first poisoning was from benzene, a toxic chemical used in rubber among other things. The second was from tetraethyl lead, which was a gas additive. General Motor’s refinery workers in a plant in New Jersey got sick with hallucinations and some died after working with the gas. The third industrial disease was caused by radium, a radioactive chemical used in luminous paint. All these diseases are just some of the many troubles that workers suffered during the 20th century. (Clark, 22)