mrs_mander_reads
Written on Jan 23, 2020
Ordinary women in 1920s America.
All they wanted was the chance to shine.
Be careful what you wish for.
The Radium Girls' story began as the First World War was raging across the globe. Radium-luminous dials were in great demand - needed for airplanes, submarines, warships and soldiers' watches. Dial-painting was a glamorous and artistic profession. Radium was the 'wonder drug', used internally and externally for all sorts of ailments, and added to everything from children's sandboxes to women's beauty products. The dialpainters were told it would make their cheeks rosy. The work was well-paid and the women 'lucky' enough to secure jobs ranked among the top 5% of female wage-earners.
And the radium did make the women glow. A Harvard study described the workers as 'luminous', stating: 'The hair, faces, hands, arms, necks, the dresses, the underclothes, even the corsets, were luminous ... they glowed like ghosts in the dark.' Using it as a beauty product they slicked it through their hair to streak it with an incandescent glow; painting it onto their eyelids and fingernails.
But after a few years their aspirational dreams started to fade and infections set in. Aches and pains that simply wouldn't go away. Wounds that didn't heal. Tissue rots around their teeth, and the jaws themselves, too, deteriorate: calcium bone crumbling into useless smithereens. Yet still the dial companies deny that the paint is poisonous, that the work is harmful in any way.
The women go into fast decline as the radium poisoning sets in - and no one seems able to stop it. Amidst the horror of a certain death, these women must find the courage to fight for justice and force the courts to pronounce radium as a toxic subject to protect other women from being harmed - before it's too late.
They must make every second count. But time is running out.
- ISBN10 1471153894
- ISBN13 9781471153891
- Publish Date 16 June 2016
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country GB
- Imprint Simon & Schuster Ltd
- Format eBook
- Pages 320
- Language English
Reviews
Veronica 🦦
Written on Aug 27, 2019
“Lip, dip, paint.”
This line is repeated over and over through the book. The companies instructed the women to use this technique to reduce waste and to give the brushes a sharper point, thus allowing the numbers to be painted better, basically. For those companies, it was all about the profit and the bottom line. They didn’t care about safety standards. They didn’t care that the women working in those factories had lives. What it came down to was money.
“Lip, dip, paint.”
Every day those women worked in those factories, they ingested radium, completely unaware of the dangers of the substance until it was too late and it became a part of their very bones. Then, they not only had to fight for their lives but for their rights and for compensation from the very companies who put them in danger in the first place. To make matters worse, these companies *knowingly* delayed the trials, hoping that the women would die before they had to make the payouts. They brought in their own people — including a fake medical doctor (he had a PhD, not an MD) — to examine the women on their own terms to ensure the women got as little money as possible.
I could not put this book down once I found the time to sit and read for more than ten minutes at a time. Kate Moore did a fantastic job all around. I could tell that she did a **ton** of research to write this book. She left no stone unturned.
The book ripped open my chest and left me with an open wound.
I had briefly read about the Radium Girls back in high school when I had to do a project for AP Chem about radium so I had an idea about who they were and what happened to them. However, I didn’t know their *stories*. I didn’t know just how much they struggled and how much they suffered. I didn’t know their legacy beyond the horrific image of the radium jaw found on Google Images.
I’m glad I know now and I’m so glad that Moore didn’t sugarcoat anything. Even now as I type this review, my hands are shaking from the residual anger I felt while I was reading. No, this anger isn’t from the writing but from the actions of those greedy men from Radiant Dial Corporation and the United States Radium Corporation who ruined these women’s lives and tried to sacrifice them all for money.
Moore does a beautiful job in bringing these women and those around them to life. The writing was lively and full of emotions. Each chapter is filled with sentences that brought the past to the present not only due to the writing but due to the research that was put into this book. These women weren’t just names anymore. They were brave women who stood up for themselves and for each other against two giants. I came to admire them for their tenacity and their bravery. Some may say that it’s ridiculous that we had to read about what they were wearing, however, I completely disagree. Knowing what these women wore, what their favourite foods were, what they did in between shifts — details like this bring life to them.
I truly believe that this book should be required reading in US history courses. I think it’s time for US history teachers/professors to consider adding this book to their required reading list. Their actions lead to the foundations of OSHA and changed the lives of working Americans. They might not have fought a war. They might not have gone into the trenches. But these women started a revolution in their own way. They contributed to American society and yet, they’re not among the group of American women that we learn about. This should change.
Although this is not an easy book to read due to its content matter, it is well worth taking the time to read it nonetheless.
lex6819
Written on Aug 2, 2019
Amber (The Literary Phoenix)
Written on Jun 3, 2018
History is important because it tells the story of humanity. These women are not part of the author's imagination - they are beautiful tragic souls. Each woman in this book chose to stand up and fight in the face of something that felt impossible. Despite their pain, despite their ultimate demise, they chose to fight to change the law and save the women who came after them. That takes strength.
Kate Moore does a wonderful job of telling these stories. The best non-fiction reads like a novel, because it takes the facts and makes it into a story that stays in your heart. It resonates with you.
The Radium Girls speaks for itself, even when the women can no longer do so. It's an incredible, horrible story and one of the best non-fiction books I've ever read. Read it, and be prepared for a broken heart.
readingwithwrin
Written on Apr 28, 2017
I knew a little bit about the radium girls, but nothing beyond the fact that they glowed after working all day.
In the early 20th century radium was discovered, and it became the new "it" thing to use and have. All types of things from medicine to things in the home were advertised to have radium in them. It's truly amazing that even though so many people knew it was dangerous still sold it as the thing to have and when it backfired the amount of cover-ups and back tracking by the companies is absolutely disgusting.
"All of the Katherine's life, radium had been a magnificent cure-all, treating not just cancer, but hay fever, gout, constipation.. anything you could think of. Pharmacists sold radioactive dressings and pills; there was also radium clinics and spas."
In the 1910's companies started popping up in America that painted clock dials using radium to make them glow. It was a good paying job and many women started working there including girls as young as fourteen. They would paint the radium on the clock's using a "lip, dip, paint" method, where they would literally be putting the radium covered paint brush in there mouth in order to make the tip as fine as possible so they would only get paint on the numbers and no where else. They were told this was completely safe, and that the small amount of radium they were getting was good for them and was actually going to make them healthier.
"We used to paint our eyebrows, our lips, and our eyelashes, and then look at ourselves in the darkroom."
But the truth was they weren't just ingesting the radium, it was going everywhere else as well which they could see when they went to the companies dark room. They literally glowed from head to toe, and they thought it was great fun. Some of them even purposefully would wear there best dresses to work in order to be able to glow that night when they went out on the town. Some companies even encourage the women to take some home in order to practice with it, meaning not only were they getting exposed to it at work, but now at home as well also putting their families at risk.
Most of the women didn't start getting sick until after they had left the company or if they did start showing signs of being sick while working they were let go. This doesn't mean that they didn't have concerns about the radium though, as time went on more and more of them started to notice things and questioned the companies. But time and time again they were assured that the radium was harmless and that the other women were sick for reasons outside of work.
"Hope. That was all he really wanted, to know that there was light at the end of the tunnel; that they could get through this and come out the other side into a shining day, and another one, and another day after that."
Another big problem was is that the small town doctors as well as big city doctors had no idea what was wrong with the ones that were sick. So instead the women were spending hundred of dollars on treatment that not only wasn't helping, but at times was making things even worse. The women and their families were determined to find out what was happening to them and how it could be fixed, no matter the price. Thousands of dollars were spent with no hope in sight for the women to be pain free or to even survive it seemed. With the help of determined city doctors and a lawyers that were determined to win their cases.
They were finally able to have a little bit of relief financially and physically. Some were even able to make it past their 70's if they were able to catch it early enough to prevent it from doing any major damage. Most though would die young, and the radium would even affect their family members.
"YOU FIGHT AND YOU FALL AND YOU GET UP AND FIGHT SOME MORE. But there will always come a day when you cannot fight another minute more."
Thank you to the women who gave everything they had to fight the companies, who didn't stop even when they were on their deathbeds. Just so there families and friends that they had worked with at the factory would have something in return for all the pain and judgment they had deserved. Who made it possible for things to be the way they are now in the workplace with the safety precautions and the benefits after getting sick from the job.
Thank you to netgalley and sourcebooks for an e-arc of this book in exchange for my honest review.
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