Note: Because I read this as an ebook, I sadly do not have any snaps.
It’s not often that I’ll ruin my sleep schedule just in order to finish a book in one sitting, and it’s even rarer for me to tear through an ebook in a single go given how much I struggle with reading on a screen, but that’s exactly what I did with “The Radium Girls.” I tore through this book in a matter of hours, and was helped along by the fact that the book is exceedingly well written in a way that makes it highly accessible to the lay reader. It focuses on telling the stories of the individual girls, not just providing an overview of what happened, which is my favorite way of looking at history.
But what did happen?
The Radium Girls were factory workers who worked painting glow in the dark clock faces. Labor conditions at the turn of the century weren’t great across the board, but it was particularly bad for these young women because the paint they were using got its glow from radium, a radioactive material discovered by Marie Skłodowska-Curie. They were instructed to bring their paintbrushes to a fine point using their mouths, which led to the ingestion of radium. In the body, radium acts like calcium and is taken into the bones, where it stays and slowly destroys everything around it.
Despite it being recognized early on that radium was dangerous to work with, the companies, who just wanted to make money, told the girls, repeatedly that the paint was safe to use. They even hired doctors to lie to the girls and tell them they were perfectly healthy. “The Radium Girls” takes us from start to finish of the stories of the women who fought the companies who poisoned them and permanently changed the landscape of occupational health and safety through their efforts.
I’d been aware of the Radium Girls for some time before this, a combination of a childhood interest in labor rights and medical history, but I’d never explored it in detail until now. And, honestly, the level of detail provided by Moore does a tremendous job of showing all the moving parts of what was happening—from why the earliest girls who came forward were misdiagnosed to just how far the companies went to avoid being held accountable to the fact that, at the time these girls were fighting to have radium recognized as an industrial poison, there were medical professionals touting it as a health cure.
All told, it was incredibly difficult for these young women to get any sort of justice and it would take 13 years and two court battles against two different companies for change to happen, and even that wasn’t the end. While I said before that “The Radium Girls” takes us from start to finish, that ‘finish’ is ongoing. As of 2015, there were still women alive who had worked in those radium factories and clean up of the factory sites, particularly the ones in Ottawa, Nebraska, was still ongoing.
A word of warning: This is a heavy story, with industrial negligence and a blatant disregard for human life at its center. The descriptions of medical conditions brought on by radiation poisoning are not sugarcoated, but nor are the needlessly graphic. Please take care of yourself while reading, and if you need to put the book down there’s no same in that.
You can pick up a copy of the book, or its young readers’ edition, through the book website, and if you want to test the waters first I strongly recommend the Sawbones episodes on radiation therapy and the Radium Girls.
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