Grace Fryer

Grace Fryer (14 March 1899 – 27 October 1933) was an American dial painter and Radium Girl, who sued U.S. Radium after suffering radium poisoning while employed painting watch faces. Subsequently, joined by fellow workers Quinta McDonald, Albina Larice, Edna Hussman, and Katherine Schaub, Fryer brought a suit labelled in the media “The Case of the Five Women Doomed to Die”. It was a pivotal case for the labor rights movement and in establishing workers' safety regulations.

Early life Grace Fryer was born on 14 March 1899 in Orange, New Jersey, one of eleven children born to Daniel Edward Fryer and Grace Moulton Gilbert. Her father was a union representative.

Fryer began working at U.S. Radium in 1917 aged eighteen and left in January 1920, having been offered work as a bank teller. Alongside 70 other women and girls, Fryer worked painting the faces of watches, clocks, and other instruments with a glow-in-the-dark radium solution.

Lawsuit against U.S. Radium Radium Girls work in a factory of the United States Radium Corporation. Within two years of leaving U.S. Radium, Fryer began losing her teeth through a painful cycle, further described in "The Radium Girls". Soon afterwards, her jaw became painful and her eyes clouded. Fryer has been described as spearheading the "long, arduous fight" for acknowledgement of "the deadly repercussions of using radium", and the demand for compensation for the women affected.