The Radium Girls is non-fiction at its finest: a really interesting book that teaches me about a topic I’d known nothing about. In this case, it’s all about radium. Specifically, it’s about the lives of the “radium girls,” young women who got jobs painting numbers on clock faces with radium-based paint in the WWI era. Why radium? It glowed in the dark.


The famous Marie Curie (along with husband Pierre) discovered radium in 1898. She called it “my beautiful radium.” It produced a glow which “stirred us with ever-new emotion and enchantment.” Radium was claimed to restore youth to the elderly, making “old men young.” It shone “like a good deed in a naughty world,” and was dubbed “liquid sunshine.” You could buy radium-infused lingerie, radium butter, radium milk, and more. One girl painted radium all over her teeth one night before a date for a brilliant smile. After all, the element now used in radiation cancer treatments was said to be “harmless to humans and easy to use.”

The residue from radium extraction was sold to schools and playgrounds, where it was mixed with sand. It was proclaimed “most hygienic … more beneficial than the mud of world-renowned curative baths.”


The girls covered in this book got jobs working at the Radium Luminous Materials Corporation. Many were young — one was just fifteen. The job paid well for the time: “it was the elite job for the poor working girls.” The girls sat along long tables, each with her own pot of “Undark” (the name for the luminous paint). In order to get the fine point needed to paint the small faces, the girls continually put the brushes in their mouths to create a sharp point. This was calling “lip-pointing.”

At the end of their shifts, the girls were brushed down in an attempt to recover radium dust so it could be used again. Still, much remained ... (complete review on my blog)

A beautifully written book that explores an important piece of history. The Radium Girls whole separated by miles wanted nothing more than independence, fun, families yet became so much more because of their illnesses. I will never be the same after reading these stories and the struggle to find what was causing their illnesses and to let the public know Radium wasn't the magical cure all they thought it was.

Even though this story is heartbreaking, I am so glad Kate Moore took the time to research and write about these brave women. Her writing style let me, as a reader, know who these women were. They were so young, and they didn't have any idea what was happening to them or what was causing it. They were truly heroes in the industrial world! This book will stay with me for a long time and I will always remember "The Radium Girls." Read It! Highly Recommend!

I received this ARC from netgalley.com in exchange for a review.

Wow. Lip, Dip, Paint. They were unknowingly putting Radium directly into their bodies.

Such an incredible story, these people suffered and endured such tradegy so that our modern society can live and work in relative comfort and health. This book/topic is a definite must read.

The book is packed with historical references and data, it is easy to read and understand.

4☆

Moore set out to do justice to the lives of the women who lost their lives to industry and she succeeds. She doesn't pull any punches. The book is hard to read in the we see what these women experienced.

"When one of the greatest radium authorities in the world tells you that you have no need to worry, quite simply, you don't."

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.

Radium Girls tells the very important story of the young women whose bodies were poisoned as they painted watch faces. Their battles with horrific radium poisoning diseases, the company's lies, and the few attorneys willing to work on their behalf make for a haunting tale. Know that their refusal to give up eventually spurred the occupational safety laws and protections we have today. How many other crucial women's stories remain buried?

A very important work about corporations taking advantage of employees. Young women and girls, and their families paid for employment with their lives. Extremely painful demises came upon those who worked in these factories mostly due to lack of safety standards for the sake of corporate profits. It's so critical that we continue with organizations such as OSHA and the EPA in order to have a higher quality of life.

4.5 Shining Stars.

Glorious one as the Victory of The Radium Girls ! !

Dip.......Lip........Paint.......

Great Thanks for Netgalley and respective publisher.

I had started late this book which led to Great book.
However, starting was slow. But, What a great rhythm had picked by story.
So many congratulations for Writer.
Writing was different and highly enthusiastic , lovely piece of description by Author.
Highly recommended to Genuine Readers.
Emotions were on Zenith as the Part 2 began throughout the book ! !
*Radium is a very rare and most catastrophic element esp. when it comes to use without precaution in Industrial task.
It's delicacy has shown in this book.
It was complete book with twist and turned of whole matter.
I had enjoyed it !
Even though, Justice had taken time about 13 years for those girls. All is well that ends well ! ! !
I'll add quote of book soon in my review.

This was a tough book to get through. One person said it best when she commented that you had to read, and then put it down for a while to let yourself breathe. That is why it took so long to write this review. It took me extra time to read the book, and a time of peace before I could put into words what I just read. This will not be an extensive review just due to the fact I am still recovering from the sadness of the truth. Women. How women are treated and regarded by men, and their worth seems to be a huge factor in this book. Radium, at this time, is a new discovery, and the glowing properties is an exciting development. Men employ women to use this new idea to create glowing face clocks. At first many people think these women have locked up and gotten a dream job. Then something strange happens. The women themselves begin to glow. What is believed to be ruminates of dust later develops into a much larger problem. The women begin to fall ill. What could be a common factor relating all this sickness amongst a particular group of women?
What to me is particularly upsetting is that fact that in scientific circles, this was known to be a dangerous substance. Still, men employed women to do the work to obtain more money. The women begin to deteriorate, slowly dying from the inside out. While they seek answers, and fight for justice, it is not seen by those who fought so hard. These women suffered excruciating deaths, but in the process saved thousands of lives in the process and ensured safety regulations were in place for those in the future.
This is a heartbreaking part of history that needs to be recognized.

Death by 'liquid sunshine.'

I devoured Radium Girls in a way that I haven't with a nonfiction book in a very long time. It is enthralling in its tragedy. Each time a girl is introduced, you know her. She is like a friend of yours, alive today, and you can see their faces so clearly. Then the girl gets that first ache, the sticky hip joint or sore tooth, and your heart drops into your stomach. You read the descriptions of their steady, painful declines into death with a broken heart because these women are so real that they feel like friends. This humanization is what sets Radium Girls apart from so many history books. Moore did an amazing amount of primary source research that I have great respect for as a historian. Hearing directly from the women and their families makes the reader appreciate the gravity of the company's transgressions. Factually it's a story of increasing occupational labor safety standards but there are so many lives that shine off the page.

Note: I received a free Kindle edition of this book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. I would like to thank them, the publisher SOURCEBOOKS (non-fiction), and the author Kate Moore for the opportunity to do so.

I averaged out my stars for this because the story and the research deserve 4 stars, but the writing is 2-star. This book feels groundbreaking and tells such an important story that bears repeating. I'd never heard anything about the dialpainters and had no idea how many women had died of radium poisoning - entirely preventable deaths. I recommend the book for its content.
That being said, it was flowery when it didn't need to be and way too wordy. These events spoke for themselves, and I felt like there was a lot of fluff. It felt like a first draft in that respect.
Still, recommended wholeheartedly. These women deserve to have their story read.

i'd never heard the story of the radium girls. i didn't know it was a thing. the only radium story i knew was the story of marie curie. when radium was first discovered it was thought to be a miracle element. it's glowing aspect was something alluring. and the discovery that it could shrink tumors is the basis of some of today's cancer treatments. however during world war i and into the 1920s, radium was used in all sorts of manners and the impact of those uses destroyed the lives of many—including the bright, young, hard-working women that are the heart of this story.

what makes this narrative so compelling is the amount of research and attention to detail moore put into bringing the girls to life. they are the heart of the story. they are the ones who suffer most acutely. they are the ones who are screwed over time and time again by big business and money and politics.

the description of their suffering is so vivid at times, you'd think you were watching a horror movie. dying of radium poisoning is not a walk in the park. the amount of suffering, the length of time, the death sentence—because there is no cure—it is unimaginable what these girls endured. and yet moore takes us on their journey from the beginning—from the excitement of being a dial painter and the glory of being one of these luminous girls—to the at time sudden, at times slow, deterioration of health—to the resulting medical treatments and investigations—to the court battles—to the lives cut short and the legacy they left behind.

moore spins a fascinating story, once you pick it up it is impossible to put down. it's a story worth reading, if only to see how long women have been battling for respect and consideration in the workplace. those girls were considered expendable by many, but their suffering was so great that it became an impetus for change and because they refused to be silenced they were able to get some justice, even if it was too late to save their lives.

Review will be published on Goodreads on May 1.

This book makes one uncomfortable from the very start. Moore lists the ways in which American society embraced the use of radium at the turn of the century. They put it on and in practically everything. It glowed in the dark, after all! It was miraculous! Moore’s blithe list is just so jarring to a 21st-century reader who is aware of radioactivity and the dangers of radium. Yet it’s an effective way to establish the setting for The Radium Girls: although plenty of people in positions of power at these companies were aware that radium could be dangerous, they weren’t eager to advertise this fact to the public or to the girls they hired.

It quickly becomes apparent that this is not an easy story to tell, either from an emotional perspective or a narrative one. I’ll talk about the emotional angle in a bit, but first I want to examine the way Moore approaches the whole saga. There are so many people involved, so many names, that it’s easy to conflate people. Moore basically keeps everything in chronological order, marching forward from World War I through the Depression, the Second World War, and then into the 1940s and beyond. To do this, however, she has to jump among several different towns and factories, introducing women and then dropping them until they re-enter the story years, if not decades later. I’d often find myself reading over a name a few times and wondering, “Is she new? Or did we meet her before?” Similarly, I needed to keep reminding myself that we weren’t dealing with a single, monolithic corporation. There was the United States Radium Corporation, and then Radium Dial, and even, finally, Luminous Processes—they were slightly different beasts, with slightly different stories and strategies and tragedies.

In other words, the story here is a complicated one. Moore does her best to tell it as simply and clearly as possible. Some of the medical and scientific details are very complex, and Moore does a great job to explain them without jargon. While a basic understanding of what elements and isotopes are and why ionizing radiation is so bad for human tissue would be helpful here, you will also learn a lot from this book. For instance, I didn’t make the connection between radium building up in the bones like calcium (yay periodicity of elements!) until Moore pointed it out.

So at first, while Moore sets the stage and introduces us to the players of this drama, The Radium Girls can feel slightly dense and occasionally opaque from the thick dust of details that settles upon the page. But as the story continues and the damning evidence mounts that radium poisoning is at the centre of the girls’ ill health, the emotional payoff of this story is far more intense and provocative than one might first expect.

Indeed, although this is non-fiction and Moore frequently quotes from both primary and secondary sources, with pages upon pages of endnotes and references at the end of the book, The Radium Girls reads more like a novel at times. That’s how much these women, their families, and those scurrilous villains of company managers and lawyers come alive. As Moore describes, with elegance and empathy and pathos, the deterioration of these women’s teeth and jawbones and legs … heartbreaking doesn’t begin describe it.

Moore reminds us that this saga unfolds over decades. This is not a matter of years but a lifetime. While the oldest radium girls were bringing the first suits against USRC and Radium Dial, a younger generation was still dipping their brushes in paint and then pointing them with their lips. The simultaneity of these events boggles the mind in hindsight, and reading it … just knowing that these women are ingesting an insanely dangerous and harmful substance … and that the companies know but don’t care …

… well, I took frequent breaks while reading this. I just couldn’t keep going sometimes. Normally the kinds of non-fiction stories that get me are the ones that focus on a single person, of course, and their struggles. This book has a much vaster cast, yet it still got to me. It still made me cry, several times over, because this story is just so awful and unnecessary and therefore needs to be told.

It’s not just the women’s physical decline, either, the senseless and unnecessary suffering of it all. It’s also the carelessness. The lack of consent. The companies would bring in doctors to examine these women, sometimes in very personal and invasive ways—and wouldn’t share the results. Long after the radium had begun to take its toll on these women’s bodies, the companies would compound that injury. Women’s bodies have long been a battleground they should never be, and Moore highlights that here.

The last act of the book ramps up on the emotions to well past 11, though. As Moore recounts the test case trial by Catherine Donohue, the story takes on all the hues of an epic legal drama deserving of a miniseries or at the very least a movie. Catherine is in so much pain, but she tries so hard to stay strong, to stay alive, long enough to bear witness to what Radium Dial did. And the lengths to which the company tries to appeal the judgments, mostly to delay long enough for Catherine to die before she can receive any compensation, are truly despicable. After seeing my reading pace pick up steadily for the middle of the book, I was back a crawl, looking up every page or so and just staring off and covering my mouth and trying to fathom how human beings can have so little regard and empathy for each other.

The Radium Girls reminds me a lot of Hidden Figures, another history book authored by a woman about a largely untold story about women. Like Hidden Figures, I think this would make a fantastic movie; this story definitely needs to be more widely known. I also love how Moore mentions the contributions of so many other professional women in this book. Dr. Alice Hamilton is a name I could just barely recall from stories about the fight against leaded gasoline. She’s involved in the battle to classify radium poisoning as an occupational health concern/industrial disease—and a quick jaunt to her Wikipedia page informed me of what a stone-cold badass she was over her 101 year on this Earth. In addition to her tireless science work, she was a political activist and professor. And then you have someone like Frances Perkins, then–Secretary of Labour and first woman cabinet member in the United States. Moore juxtaposes these powerful and inspiring women against a society that largely divests women of power or influence, even over their own bodies, as mentioned above.

The epilogue traces the impact of the radium girls over the latter half of the 20th century, including their ongoing contributions to research. Although Moore rightly commends the protections that have since been enshrined in American labour law, she pragmatically points out that those standards are only effective if followed. The radium girls’ suffering is just one example where corporations have outright lied and deceived the public and government officials simply because it might affect their profits. We saw it with leaded gasoline. With tobacco. Polymer giant DuPont was doing it quite recently. The radium girls’ story is essential not because it is a milestone from our past but because it is a mirror of our ongoing reality.

For all of its bright moments and successes in court, unlike Hidden Figures, The Radium Girls is not an upbeat and triumphant story, of course. Nevertheless, it is a testament to the fortitude and courage of the radium girls who pressed forward in legal and medical challenges over the years, as well as the experts who fought alongside them against the corporation who sought to keep everything in the dark.

They should have known better—the dark is where these girls shone brightest.

Incredible book. I was hooked from page 1 and am recommending this book to everyone.

The Radium Girls tells the incredibly shocking true story of the women considered lucky to be working with the 1920s new wonder substance, radium, and its dramatic and devastating effect on their lives. At times it is utterly unbelievable what these women went through in their fight for justice. Kate Moore does a great job of telling their story in a detailed but engaging way. I found myself reading on not only because I wanted to find out what would happen, but also because I felt invested in these women who were demonstrating extraordinary courage and perseverance.

The fight for justice was not an easy one, and every time it seemed they had had taken a couple of steps forward it was shortly followed by a step right back again. Battle after battle was fought in the doctor's offices, court rooms and media. As such the book did feel at times a little repetitive in its detail, but this served to really emphasise the injustice and how much these women had to go through. The story focuses on the women themselves, and only touches on the science of radium and historical impact of their fight.

Recommended for non-fiction fans looking for a unique and well told biographical story.

I remember reading about the radium girls as a side bar in The Poisoner’s Handbook by Deborah Blum. The story was fascinating enough as a side bar, but in The Radium Girls, Moore brings these women to life. These girls, some as young as thirteen or fourteen years old, worked painting watch dials with luminescent radium paint. The work was considered to be quite a few steps above common factory work; the work was skilled and the girls were considered lucky to be able to work with the new miracle substance: radium. With our current knowledge, what happened next should surprise no one. The girls began to get sick, many horrifically so. Their battle for compensation from the radium companies would reshape the nature of worker’s rights in the United States.

The Radium Girls is thoroughly researched and impeccably written. The depth of Moore’s work is nothing short of breathtaking. She uses primary sources, including the letters and diaries of the girls themselves, and the reminisces of their families, to give each one a unique, real voice. Moore takes the story from the original girls hired in the manufacturing boom brought on by World War One, through the following decades into the present day. Though it has been one hundred years since radium dials exploded as a wartime necessity, the ripple effect of the fates of the dial painters is still very much felt today.

Moore has done an amazing job with this story. Her careful attention to detail makes these women, who lived and dies so long ago, seem real and alive in the pages of the book. Her narrative is both educational and absorbing, making this a great nonficton read even for those who normally avoid the genre. Any fan of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot should read this next.

An advance copy of this book was provided by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

The Radium Girls The Dark Story of America's Shining Women written by Kate Moore will be published this next May 2 by Sourcebooks.

I didn't have doubts: it's a masterpiece.

A masterpiece of humanity, comprehension, love, understanding, and a great reportage.

A book with a perfect, fluid, narrative historic reconstruction of what happened to the "radium girls" and where respect for the victims it's at the first place.

It's a book very readable, a serious, passionate book of what happened along the way and during the decades at many of these girls.

A book, The Radium Girls where these girls are back in life, thanks to the humanity expressed by Kate Moore in writing this book.

You can see the various girls of the society of Radium Dial in Newark and Ottawa smiling and laughing, happy and satisfied of their life, you can look at their life in motion, their desire of a good life for themselves still very young and their loved ones.
You can see them wearing beautiful dresses and hats, sunny and beautiful.

They were after all the "Shining Girls." At Ottawa Illinois these girls for joke, when they had some free time loved to add the potion of radium and other substance they used during their work in their eyes, mouth, eyelashes, then they rushed in the darkroom and oh: they were beautifully shining!

A basket of life, dreams and desires to realize for all of them.
Life was all a smile and life was very good to them.

After all they were the dial painters of an important society and their work very well paid. They could buy with their pay whatever they wanted because what they earned was a lot and a lot of money for sure and sometimes the pay much superior at the one received by their parents.

Kate Moore visited all the places in the USA where the girls involved in this history, lived firstly and worked later and she talked with the relatives of the so-called "Radium Girls."

She told that while she wrote this book she put all the pictures of these girls close to her and I don't doubt a second that there was also their guidance behind a beautiful book like this one. A whisper from the other world.
A book helped by good spirits will always be a masterpiece because the force who guide the author is not just human.

I didn't know anything of this story.

I have always loved fluorescent objects and since now I still had in my bedroom some fluorescent rosaries and other luminous objects. I don't love darkness. While I was reading this book I thought that it was better to remove everything from the bedroom! throwing away these objects.

You mustn't think that this one will just be the story of these girls, this one without any doubt can be considered also a narrative historic book according to my point of view and it would be crucially important that everyone would read it by because of the importance of the damage caused by radiations and radioactivity.
These facts should be known by everyone.
Maybe with the time we have forgotten but we mustn't never forget.

The story starts in 1917 in Newark but ends up in recent times.

Pierre and Marie Curie discovered radium in 1898. It appeared more than clear that this substance was great for treating cancer internally. Radiotherapy is called like it for this reason.
Curie remarked that the external use was toxic and burned the skin.

Radium started to be drunk, radium became a sort of magical potion. Unbelievable but true.

The story starts when Katherine Schaub starts to work at the Radium Luminous Materials Corporation based on Third Street, Newark New Jersey.

The girls working in that society were 70 before the first world war conflict but during the war the number tripled and there was space for everyone. Cousins, friends, sisters.
There was of course great joy and happiness although during the war girls worked under pressure.
Picnics were often organized and in general all the girls were very social.
Radium was the "wonder drug" to everyone.

Grace, Irene, Mollie, Ella, Albina, Edna, Katherine, some of the name of the protagonists of this story.

A story of "Lip-Dip-Paint."

The girls while they were not painting put the brush in their mouth all the time. It was a custom, a habit. Their bosses told them to do that.

During the war the 95% of radium painted on military dials.

The first one to fall sick was Hazel although slowly most of the girls started to be very sick.

It was a problems of tooth at first.

A mysterious illness destroyed, dismantled, better, their mouth involving later their throat as well.

The illness started from the tooth, they fell with great simplicity, and we speak of very young girls of 20 years! giving at first ulcerative problems, pus.

Then the illness penetrated in profundity demolishing all the rest of the mouth's bones.

A dentist "rceived" the jaw of one of these girls in his hands while he was exploring her mouth. It simply fell in his hands.

It was a horrible illness with a lot of sufferance and a devastating death for all of them.

I picked up some pictures to add at this review and well I looked for case at a pic of a girl dead for the devastation of radium. It was terrible to see but important.

At first dentists, physicians, and doctors excluded the radium; the first girl dead was diagnosed with syphilis but who knew her, knew that it couldn't be possible.

Later dentists and physicians tried to discover if this one wasn't a case of phosphorus poisoning considering that the girls worked in a society where they managed some chemical substances. Radium couldn't never be taken in consideration because it was an amazing new substance.

Many more Radium Girls fell sick and some of these ones became, when the stadium of the illness profound, unrecognizable.

At the end a family of one of these girls preferred to avoid the vision of the corpse to friends and relatives after the death.

At the same time in Ottawa, Illinois a town of 10.000 people more or less all catholic, a town plenty of churches, old habits, good people, a town that no one could reach with great simplicity the radium company decide to open a new radium society at the beginning of 1920s.
There was of course a lot of excitement between the female young population.

Work was very well paid and a lot of them joined the company with the same procedure adopted by their colleagues of Newark: let's: "Lip-Dip-Paint."

In Newark it was the chaos, ignored by the cheerful and happy girls of Ottawa, Illinois. At the beginning, they thought of a great life: for sure this one was the sign of a great present and a better future.

It was still unknown in fact the turmoil that was going on in Newark, and the desperation of dentists and doctors unable to cure with the known therapies these girls.

Doctors simply hadn't never seen a devastation like this one and although they tried to stop this illness with all their knowledge and best medicines, no one could diminish the process of demolishing of the the mouth of these girls.

Their hair became snow-white, they became very anemic, weak.
If the illness didn't start with tooth problems these girls started to limp.

There is also to add something else: we are in the USA and there wasn't public health assistance so it means that slowly slowly once these girls fell ill it was clear that they needed intensive cure ergo a lot of money spent for a lot of cures.

One of them operated at the mouth 25 times!!! and the company at first didn't want to give them any buck because they didn't recognize any responsibility for what was going on, although with the time they introduced periodical controls and exams for the workers, and although the workers didn't never know the results of these tests.

All the money spent, the girls, proud, constricted to ask money to their families.

A boyfriend for helping his girlfriend married her because in this way she would have accepted his money.

Being this one an unknown illness sometimes doctors didn't want to be paid because of course to them these girls were subject of study but of course not all the times.

At the end one of these girl afforded to New York City where a famous doctor mr. Blum understood without too much difficulty that this one was a radioactive intoxication.

Mr Blum without any kind of shyness wrote to the radium company asking for money for curing the girl. The request was rejected, but later Marguerite found an attorney and filed suit against the United States Radium Corporation for 75.000 dollars one million of modern dollar.
Marguerite opened the road at a sort of "class action" and the case started to be known slowly also in the little and pacific town of Ottawa where the first symptoms of this illness started to appear in the girls like panic.
The luckiest ones, the ones who didn't die immediately were later affected by leukemia, bone cancer and suffered severe cases of osteoporosis.

As wrote Kate Moore the legacy of the radium girls didn't just simply set different standards at work giving also a great contribute to science and medicine, but their legacy was also left in terms of legislation.

More than 100 of these girls were later exhumed and many bodies donated to the science for experiment. In general bones and tissues of the corpses of these girls reduced in ashes and then analyzed. The girls were radioactive.

The Radium Girls without to want to be that, and this is very sad because the process passed through their devastating death and their fight for recognizing that in that society something was terribly wrong, were real, real fighters for a good, honest and safe workplace.
Dignity and health at work should always be at the first place.
That work that should have brought food on their table, joy, happy marriages, children, happy times, meant to them death. Only death and sufferance.

Work shouldn't kill anyone.

In more modern times the signs of their fight for obtaining justice recognized also after the second world war.

The USA bombarded with two atomic bombs Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the Pearl Harbor attack and the devastation of the signs left behind terrible.

President Kennedy signed so the international Limited Test Ban Treaty which prohibited atomic tests above ground, underwater and in open space.

The danger of radiations ad radioactivity recognized by everyone.

On Sept 2 2011 the city of Ottawa unveiled a statue dedicated at the Radium Girl and the governor of Illinois proclaimed that day the day of the Radium Girl.

This book is tremendously beauty also during the most difficult parts, when the girls start to be sick, when they start their crucifixion in terms of visits, hospitals, because told with true love, real passion, devotion for this story. You can visualize and see the various dentists and doctors at work. You can see their impotence and their trouble, like also their determination for trying to discover something more.

It was a battle.
The battle of the girls for trying to survive, the battle of the doctors and physician for trying to curing these girls, the sufferance of the relatives.

It's a story told with great heart and impact and I know that you will love it so badly.

These radium girls courageous.

The courage to find an answer and where no possible the courage to change, the courage of sufferance and obstinacy for obtaining that dignity that the company didn't want to recognize.

The courage to fight against giant and silence.
Some of them complained that something wrong was going on when still in health but no one listened to them because that society was giving work at so many people.

Some of these girls tried to change work but of course once radioactivity is in the body there is nothing to do.

You will discover wonderful characters also in terms of doctors and physicians. These people as said changed the course of history.

I want to remember Von Sochocky one of the boss of the radium society, also dead because of radium.
Fired from the company decided to help with all himself these girls doctors and dentists, still in trouble and desperate for trying to find a proper cure at this strange horrible illness revealing the secret formula used by the radium girls at work but not only: Von Sochocky developed also the first tests for seeing if the girls were radioactive opening so the road to radioactive future exams.

Highly highly recommended to everyone!


I thank so much NetGalley and Sourcebooks for this wonderful and so wanted book!



Anna Maria Polidori


Photo credits: Pics from the website of the city of Ottawa and if I remember well the working Radium Girl's pic from the Chicago Tribune.

Wow-eee! I nearly passed this title by, but I'm ever-so-glad I didn't. I don't have a specific course to use this in, but I'm sure to incorporate knowledge and history into a variety of the (Public Health) courses I teach. Will also recommend to friends. Thank you for the opportunity to review this book.

he Radium Girls were a group of young women who worked in the factories that painted luminous dials on watches beginning in the early 1900s and extending all the way to the 1970s. Even though there was evidence that radium was harmful, these girls were repeatedly assured that there were no harmful effects from the accepted method of painting the dials which included shaping the tip of the brush with their lips. As these girls became sick, sometimes years after their employment, the company continued their refusal to provide health benefits or worker compensation. Fighting a legal system and often public opinion that condemned their actions, the girls continued to wage their battles for justice.
The cases of the radium girls changed the law on workmen's compensation to include industrial poisoning and also to extend the statute of limitations for when radioactive poisoning attributed to the work environment could be litigated. Most importantly, it provided some justice to these women, who suffered horribly from the effects of radium in their system. Their lives changed the regulations concerning safety in the workplace using radioactive materials.
Moore tells the story through the lives of women in a very personal and compelling fashion. She has done extensive research and interviewed many of the individuals in the book. She writes in an intensely personal manner and conveys the dreams and aspirations of the women as well as their character and determination as they realize the consequences of working in these factories and experience the total breakdown of their bodies in the most horrific manner. Yet, in spite of this, they live with hope and love for one another and their families.
This book is a must read for anyone interested in women's history, for those interested in important cases in corporate law, and for those who want to be inspired.
Thanks to Kate Moore for writing this story of these courageous women and bringing to light their stories and the impact they had on occupational health and safety