Sodium Girls Sparknotes

Do you think you could be like a judge and determine who did something wrong? The play, Radium Girls, by D.W. Gregory, is about several girls that work in a very dangerous factory. There is a big mystery about why these girls randomly started getting sick and dying. A big radium factory in New Jersey, owned by a man named Arthur Roeder, keeps getting reports of his workers dying and having to get surgery due to their sickness. Roeder and the company, who only care about money, don't want this to ruin his reputation, so he tries to cover it up. Roeder and company are the ones responsible for the deaths of all of the girls because they knew how dangerous it really was and still tried to hide it away.
In the beginning of the book, there were

Grace, Amelia, Katherine, Irene, started working in Orange, New Jersey, at the radium factory. The girls were told to clean the brushes that they used for Radium with their teeth. The girls did not question this as they didn’t expect radium to kill them eventually. One of the main girls, Amelia, had suddenly died. You would expect that it would come out that the doctors said it was radium, but the report came back and said she died from something else. “Amelia Maggia passed away after years of pain in her jaw and teeth. Her condition was written off as syphilis.” (The Story of the Radium Girls). Roeder paid off the doctor to say in the report that radium wasn’t the cause because he was greedy. Later in the book, they got a real doctor, Martland, to look at Amelia to really see what it really was since they had suspicion. “Our study reveals the following: Radioactive substances have been found in large quantities in the lower jaw, the upper jaw and the lumbar vertebrae. No evidence of syphilis was found,” (Gregory 82). Roeder tried paying off the

Roeder and the company got taken to court and settled to give each of the girls 10,000 each and pay their medical bills for life. Although these reasons make Roeder seem guilty, there is still more evidence why it is his fault. In a company, there is usually a boss or supervisor that makes sure everyone is doing good and assures that they are keeping the company working well. Roeder, the boss of the factory, didn’t care what the girls did or how they were doing it. He says, “Try as I might, Harriet, try as I might-I cannot remember their faces. (The irony strikes him.) I never saw their faces,” (Gregory 110). This is ironic because he was the supervisor and boss of the company. He hired these girls to do work for him and never even cared about them. Roeder is like the manager of this company. He is in charge of everyone in the factory and it is his job to make sure that everyone is doing well and is at the very least, safe. He couldn’t do this which helps point to the reason why Roeder is the one responsible for the deaths of the Radium