The Radium Girls is a terrifying, sickening read, yet it is an excellent account of a dark spot in history. I hope I never forget those women.

A sobering look at the lives and struggles (both medical and legal) of the "Radium Girls", factory workers in the early decades of the 20th century exposed to radioactive material on a daily basis, while being told it was safe and even healthy. Moore does an excellent job of tracing the times the women lived in, and the myriad attempts at cover-ups and the struggle for justice and acknowledgment of corporate responsibility against workplace dangers. In the end, the Radium Girls' triumph in the courts makes for a story of power reclaimed by the workers. Recommended for historians, feminists, and medical and legal enthusiasts.

Despite assurances from their employers, radium was not safe for these girls to work with and in some cases ingest. They are mostly poor working class girls that feel like they've hit the proverbial lottery and bask in being known as the "shining girls" until years pass and they all start suffering from terrible illnesses. In the time of World War 1 and the years after that these girls painted watch faces and airplane instruments so that they would glow in the dark. The fact that it took years before anyone connected the fact that radium was indeed dangerous is surprising to me. The story follows two sets of women one in New Jersey and the other group in rural Illinois. Just as the New Jersey girls are getting very sick, you watch the whole story play out again from the beginning in Illinois.

Eventually, some of the surviving girls decided to take the company to court, and this is where the book really took off for me. Like a 1920's Law and Order episode the company and the doctors who worked for them continued to lie and cover up their wrongdoings. These girls were looking for money to pay their medical bills and maybe have some to leave their families as they all realized by that point that they were very sick indeed.

I would recommend this book to seventh and eighth-grade students and high school students and anyone else who hasn't read about these brave woman.

Footnote: It wasn't until 1979 that the courts found the successors of the original Radium Dial Factory liable for the clean-up costs at the old sites.

Review: The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women
On May 17, 2017 by Dawn

The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women

The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women by Kate Moore
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Like my last review, (and entirely unintentionally) The Radium Girls is another historical piece with a feminist angle, this time set in the last days of the industrial revolution.

Radium and its uses having been recently discovered, the excitement surrounding this new substance was matched only by our ignorance of it. It glows! In the dark! All by itself! This is amazing! What we didn’t know, of course, is that it’s poison, of the long, slow, torturous type.

In these pages are the story of the young women who found that out the hard way.

What I (for one) didn’t know is how much we as a society owe the memory of these poor, crumbling women. Years of legal battles, first to ensure Radium was listed as causing an “industrial illness” gaining protection for those working near it, and then for a pittance of compensation from a indifferent ex-employer. They fought and won, cementing the responsibility of employers to keep their workers safe. Even the women.

Finally, in death, or decades of living in frail bodies, still they gave more, as medical science studied, tested, poked and tracked their symptoms.

Without these women, many more would have died in industrial poisoning, but that’s not all. In later years science applied what we’d learned from studying them to all kinds of radiation, from the infamous Manhattan Project to the types of shielding used in nuclear reactors.

The Radium Girls is eminently readable, and is definitely going on my recommended reading list.

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Category : Books