The Radium Girls: a must read!

 The Radium Girls by Kate Moore is the sad story of two groups of women, miles apart, who suffer horrible illnesses and eventual death and their fight to find answers and make those responsible accountable. In 1917, Katherine Schaub starts her new job at the Radium Luminous Material Corp in Newark, New Jersey on February 1, 1917. She joins other young women to paint the dials on watches. After its discovering in 1898, radium had been a remarkable cure all for cancer, hay fever, gout, constipation, and it was in everything. People who even putting in their water as a health tonic. By 1921, strange illnesses began to appear among the girls, but no one seemed to know what going was. Soon, in Ottawa, Illinois, a new company opened and hired girls to paint watch dials. Soon these girls started to notice a pattern in their illnesses and traced it back to their jobs, painting the dials. They begin to take their fight to the companies, the courts, and the public. Will they be heard? Will they be able to end their suffering? Will the companies be held responsible?

The Radium Girls was recommended to me by a friend and I eagerly added it to my wish list. When I started to read, I was expecting to hear about illnesses, but I was not expecting the extent of these women’s suffering. I had issues with the author’s writing style and word choose. After describing the horrible conditions these women suffered with blunt and vivid imagery, she chooses to describe one woman’s extensive vaginal bleeding as “bleeding continuously down below.” Seriously!?!?! However, I had recommending The Radium Girls for the stories of these courageous women. We owe so much to them and many others for the workplace protections we now have in place. Ignore the author’s writing style and let these women’s voices come through. Many of these women would never see the outcome; but their suffering and fight wasn’t in vain. We can’t know all their names; but we can know their stories.

The Radium Girls is available in paperback, eBook, and audiobook

 A film based on The Radium Girls was released on April 27, 2018 at the Tribeca Film Festival. There is no information about a wide release. at the time of this post.