I cannot say enough good things about Kate Moore's The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women. Before I get ahead of myself, though, I should say that I had some vague knowledge, an inkling, if you will, about women who became very radioactive - and subsequently very sick - painting watches one hundred or so years ago. That is about all I could have told you before reading The Radium Girls.
In Radium Girls, Moore not only provides a thorough recounting of the history of the radium industry, but also of the personal stories and prolonged court battle the women fought in fits and starts before finally and ultimately prevailing. (OSHA is just one of the many workplace safety advances that owes its existence to the radium girls' fight.)
It is impossible to read this book without feeling angry at the abuse of power exercised by the company, as well as the utter lack of rights had by the women, not only as workers, but as women. I tore through this book, equal parts fascinated and enraged as the story unfolded. Moore splits her narration between the plant in Orange, New Jersey, and that in Ottawa, Illinois, where hundreds of mostly young, mostly poor girls, often from immigrant families, painstakingly painted the numbers onto watch faces with a paint whose active ingredient was none other than pure radium. Unsurprisingly, from the vantage point of the twenty-first century, the women soon began falling seriously ill with a variety of ailments from necrosis of the jaw to bone sarcomas to legs that suddenly shortened, leaving them with pronounced limps - and pain.
As I said before, I cannot offer enough praise for this work, which - in the same vein as such works as Ashes Under Water and Dead Wake - chronicles an important yet largely forgotten episode in this country's history.
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