Fall Play: These Shining Lives

These Shining Lives revolves around the real-life circumstances of women in the 1920s who worked in a watch factory painting watch faces with glowing radium-rich paint. When Catherine Donohue and her three co-workers/friends begin to fall ill and  they discover the source of their sickness is the radioactive paint, they decide to seek retribution in the form of a class-action lawsuit against their employer, Radium Dial Company.Though the women are doomed to die, their struggle to fix what is broken demonstrates the power of the female spirit despite the curbing of women’s newly won social freedoms during the Great Depression. The real-life "Radium Girls" took their company to court and achieved a long-lasting victory over corporations with poor workplace conditions and worker’s compensation that is still in effect today.