These Shining Lives

In this drama centering around Catherine Donahue and her three coworkers / friends, the new financial independence of women working in the post-war 1920s is both liberating and exciting. The women earn a comfortable living painting watch faces glow-in-the-dark. This new vision of freedom is shattered when one by one the women begin to fall ill to mysterious ailments. They discover the source of their sickness is radioactive paint used for the watches, and 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.