The Radium Girls | Kate Moore

Title: The Radium Girls

Author: Kate Moore

If you are looking to try reading more non-fiction, The Radium Girls by Kate Moore is a compelling choice. It is certainly not the most joyful subject, but it is an incredibly interesting and frequently enraging account of a dark chapter in American industrial history. Moore utilizes original interviews, diaries, letters, and court accounts to reconstruct the lives of working-class women hired to paint luminous watch dials for the military. These women were taught to use their lips to point their brushes, effectively swallowing radium with every stroke. Even those who didn't use the lip-pointing method were coated in radioactive dust that they inadvertently carried home to their families at the end of every day.

The physical descriptions of the radiation poisoning are harrowing. The narrative tracks a progression of horror where a woman's jaw literally falling apart is only the beginning of the tragedy. The book details a litany of suffering including honeycombed bones, sarcomas, and fragments of bone being expelled through pus-filled holes in the mouth. These women faced severe anemia, hemorrhaging, and infertility, often living in perpetual, agonizing pain for years or even decades while their families went into massive debt attempting to find a cure.

What makes the story truly infuriating is the systemic cover-up orchestrated by the dial companies. The corporations knew the material was lethal but paid off doctors, dentists, and lawyers to deny the cause of the illnesses. They went as far as destroying the reputations of the dying women in order to protect their profits and continued hiring new workers to handle materials they knew were killing people. The book serves as a powerful testament to the tenaciousness of these women. Without their refusal to stay quiet, these companies would never had been held accountable for the harm they allowed to continue.

Four out of five stars.