Book Review: Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women (OT) (also, a movie)

Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women, by Kate Moore (Sourcebooks, 2016, 480pp HB, $26.99)

In the 1920s with the 1898 discovery of radium by Marie and Pierre Curie, the "healing" properties of this new element came to people's attention. Plus its ability to shine (glow) in the dark.

It was this latter property that made it so valuable. Girls* were hired to paint the numbers on watches and clocks with this new 'magical' paint that allowed people to tell time at night. This was especially valuable for soldiers in the field so these dial-painting companies became quite busy and the girls who were the dial-painters made a very good salary during the Depression. And 'girls' they were: some started in the 'studios' at the age of 14.

Dial-painting was a very prestigious job and not only for the rather high salary. The girls worked as much as they could and became very close: it was a fun job. 

Until they started dying. First their teeth fell out, then they had skeletal weaknesses. All this took from mere months to  years. They became living corpses and were fired for limping. By 1925 the world knew radium was  poison but the companies refused to believe it.

Ghost Women

The living dead became shrunken and shapeless, mere eggshells of their former selves. Most of them.

Radium Girls is a long book (nearly 500 pages) that reads quickly. Author Kate Moore wanted to give credence to all the girls so the reader may have a hard time remembering who is who: that's why the list of key characters goes on for four pages. And perhaps because they were young girls, their legal fights went on longer than necessary but may be the main reason we today have organizations like OSHA - to protect the naive who work so hard for the company executives.

Also a play in England and a movie, Radium Girls will stay in your mind for a long time.

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*I found it interesting how the girls were called 'girls' in the book but men were called 'men,' This might have mirrored society as a whole during those days. This reviewer also noticed some other little quirks in the writing that made her think English may not have been the author's (editor's) first language (then I found out the author is British).