Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women
By Kate Moore
4.5 stars
Besides being featured in a documentary and a play years ago, amazingly, this is a mostly untold story in industrial history. Hundreds of young women were hired in New Jersey and later Ottawa, Illinois to be dial painters. They used a radium based substance to paint luminescent faces for watches and instrument panels, often using their lips to point their paint brushes. As the years passed, these women began to experience painful, grotesque and troubling symptoms that left them horrifically sick or dead. This story follows some of the more outspoken of the young women, along with their doctors and lawyers, as they fought back against the companies that knowingly endangered them. This book is extraordinary. You can tell just by reading how emotionally connected that author became with her subjects and it only adds to the overall awe of these incredible young women. I think this is an especially important book as the new administration is starting to do away with some of the industrial regulations. There are reasons that these regulations are necessary and it is books like this that keep stories like this alive. I receive this book through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
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