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I haven’t listed this post as a book review because I’m not quite finished with it, but The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Girls by Kate Moore is definitely on my highly recommended list.
As I watch Fallout and play Fallout New Vegas, I realized that we don’t have to experience nuclear war to be poisoned by radiation. For the poor young women who painted thousands of glow-in-the-dark watch faces in the 1920s for radium dial factories, all they needed was to have agile fingers and a desire to earn extra money for their families to be thoroughly poisoned by unscrupulous business executives.
The book meticulously uncovers the excitement that the world felt at this new wonder material, radium. Radium could light up the darkness! It could heal you from the inside out if you took radium pills! Of course, the world did not know yet about the horrors of radium poisoning. Kate Moore documents the appalling descent into poisoned young bodies and the lies and deceit that the radium corporations went through to avoid being responsible for the deaths of so many women who had worked at their factories.
One of the images that will forever remain with me is of the girls painting their faces and not worrying about the radium dust that covered their bodies and their clothes as they left the factory because of the otherworldly glow that the chemical imparted on them. Little did they know that the chemical that they ingested daily as they licked the paint brushes they used to create the fine points that they needed to paint tiny numbers on watch dials and that covered their bodies was seeping into their bones, lying in wait to then slowly eat through those bones like acid.
I was truly horrified at the lengths the paint companies went through to deny any responsibility, from relying on statutes of limitations that were shorter than the period it took for the radium to begin poisoning the girls, to employing “doctors” on staff that declared all of the girls healthier than anybody they’d seen, to denying that radium was even a poison at all, despite mounting evidence for its harmful attributes.
There are a few heroes in the story, doctors that kept studying the harmful effects of the material, lawyers that bravely took on the girls’ cases and fought for their rights, and, of course, the many young women themselves. These girls fought for their rights and their lives, even as their bodies disintegrated before them.
This is a book that pulls no punches. The descriptions of the terrible things that the radium did to these women in the prime of their lives are horrifying and hard to stomach. But the book also does a wonderful job of showing how a variety of people refused to give in to the seemingly impossible odds of fighting powerful corporations.
I definitely recommend checking it out.