The Radium Girls: Young Readers' Edition: The Scary but True Story of the Poison that Made People Glow in the Dark

By Kate Moore

Explore the unbelievable true story of America's glowing girls and their fight for justice in the young readers edition of the New York Times and USA Today bestseller The Radium Girls. This enthralling new edition includes all-new material, including a glossary, timeline, and dozens of bonus photos.

Amid the excitement of the early twentieth century, hundreds of young women spend their days hard at work painting watch dials with glow-in-the-dark radium paint. The painters consider themselves lucky—until they start suffering from a mysterious illness. As the corporations try to cover up a shocking secret, these shining girls suddenly find themselves at the center of a deadly scandal.

The Radium Girls: Young Readers Edition tells the unbelievable true story of these incredible women, whose determination to fight back saved countless lives.

This new edition of the national bestseller is perfect for:

• Educators looking for history books for kids ages 9 to 12, nonfiction books for kids, biographies for kids, and real stories around the industrial revolution, chemistry, and science
• Parents, educators, and librarians looking for stories about strong women, inspiring books for girls, childrens books about women in history, and famous women books for girls
• Young readers who want to read one of the most inspiring and shocking narratives of the early 20th century

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sourcebooks
• Release date: Sep 8, 2020
• ISBN: 9781728209487

Kate Moore

Kate Moore is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of The Radium Girls, which won the 2017 Goodreads Choice Award for Best History, was voted U.S. librarians’ favorite nonfiction book of 2017,and was named a Notable Nonfiction Book of 2018 by the American Library Association. A British writer based in London, Kate writes across a variety of genres and has had multiple titles on the Sunday Times bestseller list. She is passionate about politics, storytelling, and resurrecting forgotten heroes.

Book preview

The front cover for “The Radium Girls: Young Readers’ Edition#x201D; by Kate Moore. The cover depicts a lime green tinted photo of five women dressed in 1920s hats and coats. There is also an illustrated table of green paint, a clock dial and a skull.The title page for “The Radium Girls: Young Readers’ Edition” by Kate Moore, published by Sourcebooks Explore.

Copyright © 2020 by Kate Moore

Cover and internal design © 2020 by Sourcebooks

This work is adapted for young readers and is based on The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women by Kate Moore, copyright © 2017 by Kate Moore, published by Sourcebooks.

Cover art © Alexis Snell

Internal design by Danielle McNaughton/Sourcebooks

Internal stock images © BananyakoSensei/Shutterstock

Photo acknowledgments, page 362

Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks.

The author and publishers have made all reasonable efforts to contact copyright holders for permission and apologize for any omissions or errors in the form of credits given. Corrections may be made to future printings.

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For all the dial-painters and those who loved them

I shall never forget you…

Hearts that know you love you

And lips that have given you laughter

Have gone to their lifetime of grief and of roses

Searching for dreams that they lost

In the world, far away from your walls.

· OTTAWA HIGH SCHOOL YEARBOOK, 1925 ·

CONTENTS

AUTHOR’S NOTE

LIST OF KEY CHARACTERS

PROLOGUE

PART ONE: KNOWLEDGE

1. First Day

2. Wartime Warning

3. All Change

4. The Mysterious Maladies of Mollie Maggia

5. Girls Wanted

6. Mere Coincidence?

7. Radium Games

8. Strange Symptoms

9. Something Going On

10. Investigations Underway

11. Warning Shots

12. Lip… Dip… Paint

13. Truth and Lies

14. Hoffman Helps

15. Making History

16. Hope

PART TWO: POWER

17. The List of the Doomed

18. Dead End

19. Until Death Do Us Part

20. Make or Break

21. Fraud of Frauds

22. In the Shadow of the Church Spire

23. Back from the Grave

24. The Trial of the Decade

25. On the Stand

26. Far from Finished in This Fight

27. Settlement?

28. The Chill of Fear

29. Happy Ending?

30. Midnight Machinations

31. A Cold, Cold Winter

32. Time-Bomb Tumors

33. A Very Big Mistake

34. The End of the Adventure

35. Brave Until the Last

PART THREE: JUSTICE

36. Conspiracy?

37. Very Suspicious

38. Verdict

39. Fighting Back

40. A Desire for Justice

41. Legal Champion

42. A Long and Lonely Fall

43. Her Day in Court

44. Too Weak for Tears

45. Bedside Hearing

46. The Society of the Living Dead

47. One More Day

EPILOGUE

POSTSCRIPT

TIMELINE OF EVENTS

GLOSSARY

ABBREVIATIONS

PHOTO ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

NOTES

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Dear Reader,

The women you’re about to meet in this book are incredibly special, for so many reasons. I feel very lucky that I’m the one who gets to introduce them to you. For these women are my heroes, and I hope by the time you’ve finished reading that they may be heroes to you too. Or, at the very least, good friends.

Their story is a true one, and it happened about a hundred years ago. It started with what they thought of as a piece of luck: when they were teenagers, they landed jobs that everybody wanted, paid really well, and were glamorous, artistic, and fun. They had no idea that, one day, you would be reading their story. You are doing so only because of how they faced what happened next. Because that piece of luck had a very dark flip side. Yet when the radium girls faced pain and heartache and injustice and tragedy, they did not suffer in silence. They chose, as a sisterhood, to rise up and fight back—with everything they had.

As a result, America’s shining girls now shine through history as an inspirational example of standing up for your rights. They stand as an example that no matter how small and powerless you may sometimes feel, you can make a difference. Because against all the odds, the radium girls made the world a better place. They made it better for every single person on this planet. These courageous women left us all an extraordinary legacy—in science, health-and-safety laws, and human rights—that their teenage selves would likely be astonished by.

But you never know what you may achieve when you grow up.

Their story may have started a hundred years ago, but please don’t think that just because their story is old, it doesn’t have any meaning today. If you look around, you may see echoes of it on the nightly news. You may see men and women fighting for justice just as the radium girls once did. And perhaps one day, like these young women, you too will lend your voice to a cause in order to fight for what you believe in. I hope you may take inspiration from them when that day comes.

The radium girls’ story is a sad one. While I was writing their book, I cried many times. Yet I hope, when you finish it, that you’re left with a feeling that’s like sunshine after rain. Because for all the sadness in their tale, you can still take hope from it. You can take strength from their strength and courage from their courage. Even though they’re not with us anymore, these amazing women live on—in the beating hearts of those whose lives they saved, in their enduring gift of knowledge, and in the minds of those who read their incredible story…which now includes you.

Thank you for being part of their legacy.

I hope you may use it, in your own way, to become a hero too.

Yours truly,

The Signature of author Kate Moore

LIST OF KEY CHARACTERS

NEWARK AND ORANGE, NEW JERSEY

The Dial-Painters

The Carlough Sisters

Marguerite Carlough

Sarah Carlough Maillefer

The Maggia Sisters

Albina Maggia Larice

Amelia Mollie Maggia

Quinta Maggia McDonald

Their Colleagues

Edna Bolz Hussman

Ella Eckert

Grace Fryer

Hazel Vincent Kuser

Irene Rudolph, Katherine Schaub’s cousin

Katherine Schaub, Irene Rudolph’s cousin

The United States Radium Corporation

Arthur Roeder, president (from 1921)

Edwin Leman, chief chemist

Howard Barker, chemist and vice president

Sabin von Sochocky, founder and inventor of the paint

Doctors

Dr. Frederick Flinn, company doctor

Dr. Harrison Martland, Newark doctor

Dr. Joseph Knef, Dr. Walter Barry, Dr. James Davidson, local dentists

Dr. Robert Humphries, doctor at the Orange Orthopedic Hospital

Dr. Theodore Blum, New York dentist

Investigators

Dr. Alice Hamilton, Harvard School of Public Health, Katherine Wiley’s ally and colleague of Cecil K. Drinker

Andrew McBride, commissioner of the Department of Labor

Dr. Cecil K. Drinker, professor of physiology at the Harvard School of Public Health

Ethelbert Stewart, commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Washington, DC

Dr. Frederick Hoffman, investigating statistician

John Roach, deputy commissioner of the Department of Labor

Katherine Wiley, executive secretary of the Consumers League, New Jersey

Swen Kjaer, national investigator from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Washington, DC

OTTAWA, ILLINOIS

The Dial-Painters

Catherine Wolfe Donohue

Charlotte Nevins Purcell

Ella Cruse

Inez Corcoran Vallat

Margaret Peg Looney

Marie Becker Rossiter

The Radium Dial Company

Joseph Kelly, president

Lottie Murray, superintendent

Rufus Fordyce, vice president

Rufus Reed, assistant superintendent

PROLOGUE

Paris, France

1901

The scientist had forgotten all about the radium. It was tucked within his waistcoat pocket, enclosed in a slim glass tube in such a small quantity that he could not feel its weight. He had a lecture to give in London, England, and the vial of radium stayed within that shadowy pocket throughout his journey across the sea.

He was one of the few people in the world to possess it. Discovered by Marie and Pierre Curie in December 1898, radium was so difficult to extract from its source that there were only a few grams available anywhere in the world. He was lucky to have been given a tiny amount by the Curies to use in his lectures. They barely had enough themselves to continue their experiments.

Yet this did not affect the Curies’ progress. Every day, they discovered something new about their element. It made ghostly white pictures on photographic plates. It destroyed the materials in which it was wrapped. Marie called it my beautiful radium—and it truly was. Deep in the dark pocket of the scientist, the radium broke through the gloom with an unending, eerie glow. These gleamings, Marie wrote of its luminous effect, stirred us with ever-new emotion and enchantment.

Enchantment… It implies a kind of sorcery, almost supernatural power. No wonder the U.S. surgeon general said of radium that "it reminds one of a mythological super-being. An English physician would call its enormous radioactivity the unknown god."

Gods can be kind. Loving. Generous. Yet as the playwright George Bernard Shaw once wrote, "The gods of old are constantly demanding human sacrifices." Enchantment—in the tales of the past and present—can also mean a curse.

So although the scientist had forgotten about the radium, the radium had not forgotten him. As he traveled to England, the radium shot out its powerful rays toward his pale, soft skin. Days later, he would peer in confusion at the red mark blooming mysteriously on his stomach. It looked like a burn, but he had no memory of coming near any flame. Hour by hour, it grew more painful. It didn’t get bigger, but it seemed, somehow, to get deeper, as though that unknown flame was burning him still. It blistered into an agonizing flesh burn. The pain made him suck in his breath sharply and rack his brains. What on earth could have inflicted such damage without him noticing?

And it was then that he remembered the radium.

PART ONE

KNOWLEDGE

1.

FIRST DAY

Newark, New Jersey

1917

Katherine Schaub had a jaunty spring in her step as she walked the brief four blocks to work. It was February, but the cold didn’t bother her. She had always loved the winter snows of her hometown. Yet the frosty weather wasn’t the reason for her high spirits on that particular icy morning. Today, she was starting a brand-new job at the watch-dial factory of the Radium Luminous Materials Corporation.

To her excitement, Katherine had been hired to work in the company’s glamorous-sounding studio. Her job was to paint watch dials with glow-in-the-dark radium paint. Katherine was just fourteen—her fifteenth birthday was in five weeks’ time—but she was sure to fit in. Most of her fellow dial-painters were teenagers too. Katherine was blond-haired and blue-eyed, and she loved to sing, play piano, and write—her dream was to become an author. Most of all, she was a go-getter. She’d gotten the job at the studio simply by asking the boss for one outright.

A portrait of Katherine Schaub.

Katherine Schaub.

As Katherine walked into the studio on her first day, she saw the other dial-painters were already hard at work. Young girls sat in rows, painting dials at top speed. Yet it wasn’t the dials that caught Katherine’s eye. It was the material they were using to paint them. It was the radium.

Radium was a wonder element. Everyone knew that. Katherine had read all about it in magazines and newspapers, which were always full of advertisements for new radium products. At the turn of the century, scientists had discovered that radium could destroy human tissue. After that, it had quickly been used to treat cancerous tumors, with remarkable results. It saved lives. People therefore assumed it must be healthful. So all of Katherine’s life, radium had been marketed as a magnificent cure-all. It wasn’t just used to treat cancer but also hay fever and constipation…really, anything you could think of. People popped radioactive pills to treat their ailments, yet they also used radium products to ward off ill health and to give them energy. Radium water was drunk daily as a health tonic. The recommended dose was five to seven glasses a day.

The element was dubbed "liquid sunshine," and it was an entrepreneur’s dream. Also on sale were radium butter, milk, and chocolate, radium toothpaste (guaranteeing a brighter smile with every brushing), and even a range of Radior cosmetics, which offered radium-laced face creams, soap, and makeup. But because radium was the most valuable substance on earth—selling for $120,000 for a single gram, which is $2.2 million in today’s values—these products weren’t aimed at poor working-class girls like Katherine. It was mainly the rich and famous who were lucky enough to get up close with radium.

Well, the rich and famous—and the dial-painters. They perhaps got closest to radium of all.

To her delight, Katherine could see that there was luminous radium dust scattered all over the studio. Even as she watched, little puffs of it seemed to hover in the air before settling on the shoulders or hair of a dial-painter at work. To her astonishment, it made the girls themselves gleam. Each girl mixed her own paint. She dabbed a little radium powder into a small white dish, then added water and some glue to make the greenish-white luminous paint. The company called this paint Undark. The fine yellow powder contained only a tiny amount of radium. It was mixed with zinc sulfide, which reacted with the radium to give a brilliant glow. But tiny amount or not, the stunning, shining radium was even more beautiful than Katherine had imagined.

Her very first task that morning was to learn the technique that all new dial-painters were taught. Katherine carefully picked up the finely bristled, camel-hair paintbrush she was given. She saw that the smallest pocket watch the girls had to paint measured only three and a half centimeters across. The tiniest element to be painted on the watch was just a single millimeter in width. Yet the girls would be fired if they painted outside the lines. So even though their paintbrushes were thin, the girls had to make the brushes even finer.

A tray of radium dials like the ones Katherine would have worked on.

A tray of radium dials like the ones Katherine would have worked on.

There was only one way they knew of to do that. They put the brushes in their mouths.

It was a technique called lip-pointing. Katherine had to suck on the brush to make it taper to a point. Following the company’s instructions, Katherine put the brush to her lips, dipped it in the radium, and painted the dials. It was a "lip, dip, paint routine." All the girls did it that way—they lipped and dipped and painted all day long.

The dial-painters did not adopt the technique without checking it was safe. "The first thing we asked [our bosses was] ‘Does this stuff hurt you?’ remembered one of Katherine’s colleagues. And they said, ‘No.’ [They] said that it wasn’t dangerous, that we didn’t need to be afraid." After all, radium was the wonder element. The girls, if anything, should find that swallowing it did them good. They soon grew so used to the brushes in their mouths that they stopped even thinking about it.

But for Katherine, it felt peculiar, that first day, as she lip-pointed over and over. Yet she was constantly reminded why she wanted to be part of the glamorous workforce. The dust-covered dial-painters shone like otherworldly angels all around her. And they dressed like queens, in expensive silks and furs. The women were paid a flat rate for every watch they painted, which meant the most skilled workers could take home, in today’s money, almost $40,000 a year. This ranked them in the top 5 percent of female wage earners nationally and gave them plenty of spare cash for shopping. So Katherine persevered. She and the well-dressed dial-painters soon became friends, sitting together to eat lunch, sharing sandwiches and gossip over the dusty tables. They had fun at company picnics too.

Yet in that spring of 1917, there was not much fun happening in the wider world. For the past two and a half years, a terrible war had been raging in Europe. Most Americans had been happy to stay out of the conflict. But in 1917, that neutral position became impossible. So on April 6, just a few short months after Katherine started work, Congress voted America into what would become known as the war to end all wars.

2.

WARTIME WARNING

In the dial-painting studio, the impact of America entering the First World War was immediate. Demand for the company’s luminous paint rocketed. It was applied not only to watches but also to gunsights, ships’ compasses, and aeronautical instruments, and it had many more military uses. The studio in Newark, New Jersey, where Katherine worked was far too small to produce the numbers required. So her bosses opened a purpose-built plant just down the road in Orange, New Jersey. This time, there wouldn’t only be dial-painters on-site. The company was expanding, now doing its own radium extraction, which required laboratories and processing plants.

Katherine was among the first workers through the door of the two-story brick building that housed the new studio. She and the other dial-painters were delighted by what they found. The second-floor studio was charming, with huge windows on all sides and skylights in the roof. The spring sunshine streamed in, giving excellent light for dial-painting.

An appeal for new workers to help the war effort was made. Just four days after war was declared, Grace Fryer answered the call. She had more reason than most to want to help, because two of her brothers were heading to France to fight. Lots of dial-painters were motivated by the idea of helping the troops. "The girls, wrote Katherine, were but a few of the many who through their jobs were ‘doing their bit.’"

Grace was a woman who really cared about her community. Her father was a representative of the carpenters’ union, and Grace had picked up his political principles. Aged eighteen, she was an exceptionally bright and pretty girl with curly chestnut hair and hazel eyes. Many called her striking, but her looks weren’t of much interest to Grace. Instead, she preferred to focus on her career. She soon excelled at dial-painting, regularly completing 250 dials a day.

Grace, Katherine, and the other women sat side by side at long wooden tables running the full width of the room. Wartime demand was so high that as many as 375 girls were soon recruited. Hazel Vincent was one. She had an oval face with a button nose and fair hair. Other new joiners included the music-loving Edna Bolz, who was nicknamed the Dresden Doll because of her beautiful golden locks, and Ella Eckert, who had a great sense of fun. Dial-painting was such a desirable profession that the radium girls promoted the vacancies to their loved ones. Katherine’s orphaned cousin Irene Rudolph was hired. It wasn’t long before whole sets of siblings were seated alongside each other too, merrily painting away. These included the Maggia sisters—Mollie, Quinta, and Albina—and the Carlough girls, Sarah and Marguerite.

Grace Fryer (far left) on a makeshift bridge behind the studio with two colleagues.

Grace Fryer (far left) on a makeshift bridge behind the studio with two colleagues.

That summer, the plant was full of activity. "The place was a madhouse!" one worker exclaimed. The girls did overtime, working seven days a week, with the studio operating night and day. There was a lot of work to do. In 1918, an estimated 95 percent of all the radium produced in America was used to make radium paint and applied to military dials. By the end of the year, one in six American soldiers would own a luminous watch.

The dial-painting studio in Orange, New Jersey, in the early 1920s.

The dial-painting studio in Orange, New Jersey, in the early 1920s.

Though the pace was demanding, the setup was still rather fun for the women. They reveled in the drama of long shifts painting dials for their country. Now and then, they even found time for a game. One favorite was to scratch their name and address into a watch, a message for the soldier who would wear it. Sometimes, he would respond with a note.

Despite the occasional games, the girls were under pressure. If a worker failed to keep up the breakneck pace, she was criticized. If she fell short repeatedly, she was fired. The company’s biggest concern was any wasting of the expensive radium. The girls were covered in it—their "hands, arms, necks, the dresses, the underclothes, even the corsets of the dial-painters were luminous," wrote one observer. So when a shift was over, the women were ordered to brush the radium from their clothes. The sparkling particles were swept from the floor into a dustpan for use the next day.

But no amount of brushing could get all the dust off. Edna Bolz remembered that even after the brushing down, "When I would go home at night, my clothing would shine in the dark." Grace recalled that even her boogers became luminously green! The girls glowed like ghosts as they walked home through the streets of Orange.

The company was haunted by the waste. Soon, it banned the water dishes in which the women cleaned their radium-encrusted brushes. The bosses said that too much valuable material was lost in the water. Now the girls had no choice but to lip-point, as there was no other way to clean off the radium that hardened on the brush. As Edna Bolz observed, "Without so doing, it would have been impossible to have done much work."

So Edna and Grace, Katherine and Irene, and the Maggia and Carlough sisters did just as they were told. Lip… Dip… Paint.

The dial-painters’ boss was Sabin von Sochocky. He was an Austrian-born, thirty-four-year-old doctor who’d invented the radium paint back in 1913. In his first year in business, he’d sold two thousand glow-in-the-dark watches. Now, the company’s output ranked in the millions. His company had made him a very rich man. American magazine called him "one of the greatest authorities in the world on the subject of radium."

Von Sochocky, like many others, was bewitched by the wonder element. He was known to play with it. He would hold tubes of glowing radium with his bare hands or immerse his arm up to the elbow in radium solutions. His careless attitude was striking because von Sochocky knew that radium was in fact very dangerous.

The doctor had studied under the very best radium experts on the planet: Marie and Pierre Curie. The Curies by that time were familiar with radium’s hazards because they’d suffered many radiation burns themselves. Pierre had even gone on record in 1903 to say that radium could probably kill a man. It was true that radium could save your life if you had cancer by destroying your tumor. But it could devastate healthy tissue too.

Von Sochocky

Reviews for The Radium Girls

[spiffyhink · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

My god, this book was a difficult read. In fact, although I found it gripping and finished it quickly, I did have to take a break about halfway through it because I found I was getting extremely frustrated and it was beginning to affect my mood. I’ve had my own run-ins with injustice and spent a good amount of time in court, and I am grateful that I was not there for the same reasons that these women were, because reading about their slow, painful deaths, was horrifying. They literally watched themselves fall apart, after being repeatedly lied to and mislead by the company they were working for.
And the extend to which they were mislead, which I was unaware of before diving into this book, went far beyond ignorance or minor transgressions. The Radium Dial company and others with them went out of their way to cover up years of scientific evidence proving that radium was poisonous, withhold the women’s medical records (I know the book refers to them as “girls” because it was appropriate for the times, but they were women, and that is how I prefer to label them), and even, in the case of one of the ladies, perform an illegal autopsy in which they destroyed the part of her body that would have been used as evidence (!!!). After the women and their families went directly to these cheats to ask for compensation for the upteenth time, I was internally yelling at them to start an educational campaign against them, or to start picketing, or something that would increase public pressure against them, but the times were different then. They did not have the same access to the public that we do now, and it was not normal to question one’s employer, especially if you were a young, unmarried woman.
I had not realized the impact this had on worker’s compensation rights in the U.S. until I reached the end of this book, and in fact I’m surprised that it’s not something that we’re more aware of generally these days. Most of us in the U.S. work, and thus have a very real interest in our own safety, even if we’re never told to put radioactive paint in our mouths on a daily basis. It is because of the women who fought that we mostly don’t have to worry about this (although there is mention that they tried this sort of B.S. again much later, in the 70s and were shut down for it. Greed never learns, I suppose).
I do agree with some of the other reviewers that Moore’s tendency to end everything on cliffhangers got very annoying after a while, but I pushed past it because the rest of the book was so good.

[ahef1963 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women by Kate Moore was one of the most inspirational books I’ve ever read (listened to, actually). Detailing the lives and horrible deaths of radium-dial painters in New Jersey and Illinois, the story is one that captivated the world and the courts, and which opened the door for occupational safety standards in workplaces across the United States. The women who waged this battle suffered horrible lives and deaths but did so to help others in similar industries. I admired them greatly and wept copiously during the last chapters of the book.

Radium-dial painting is the act of detailing clocks and aeronautical dials of various sorts with luminous paint, which is made up of radium and water. The girls were encouraged to put the paintbrushes in their mouths to keep them narrow enough to do the meticulous work. That’s right: they were urged to put paintbrushes coated with radioactive ingredients into their mouths.
They died. And before they died their teeth fell out, their gums grew abcesses, their jawbones pierced the skin of their mouths and fell apart. They were troubled with huge sarcomas on every part of their body. Their hips disintegrated until the girls had legs of different length and could walk only with a cane. Their pain turned to agony. They couldn’t eat. They became skeletal versions of their younger, happier selves. It was awful to hear about; I can’t imagine suffering such anguish.

The management of the radium companies were the worst people I’ve ever met in a book, both fictional and real. Snow White’s horrid stepmother was more likeable. (I’m not kidding.) They refused to help the girls that their negligence had murdered. They refused to believe that radium could cause harm. Even when they found out that indeed, radium was poisonous, they didn’t care. They lied and cheated and manipulated as young women lost their lives in direst agony. I have never been as angered by a book.

Despite the deaths, the families left without their daughters, wives, mothers, aunts, the friends left behind to mourn them, the book was a real inspiration. Even though Kate Moore’s writing left something to be desired, and though the narrator was frankly dreadful, the story captivated me. I hope that I can learn to be as brave and as determined as the women I met in this book. May they all rest in peace.

Edit: One of the little clocks in my bedroom has a luminous dial. It used to belong to my grandmother, and passed to me after her death. This little clock that glows at night is old enough that it probably passed through the hands of a radium-dial painter and may even have been one of the clock faces that contributed in a small way to a young woman slowly being poisoned by radium. I will treasure it all the more.

[creighley_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

1917. As a war raged across the world, young American women flocked to work, painting watches, clocks, and military dials with a special luminous substance made from radium. It was a fun, lucrative and glamorous job-the girls themselves shone brightly in the dark, covered head to toe in the dust from the paint. They were the radium girls. As the years passed, the women began to suffer from mysterious, crippling I’ll Essex. The very thing that made them feel a,I’ve-their work- was in fact killing them: they had been poisoned by the radium paint. Yet their employers denied all responsibility. And so, in the face of death-these courageous women refused to accept their fate quietly, and instead fought for justice. (True, tragic tale of corporate evil and courage in the face of it)

[muumuumousie · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Heartbreaking and meticulously researched, this book makes for a powerful read. Moore covers a broad scope while still depicting certain historical characters in great detail. The book is highly readable and feels like fiction. I think that Moore, in a few places, tried a little too hard to make the book flow. For example, she tried to draw a parallel between the girls' plight and the Easter celebrations that were happening at the same time; she described Easter as Christ being "reborn." I get that she's being poetic, but it isn't a rebirth. It's a resurrection. There are a few other times when she'll add in details that seem impossible to verify. For example, one of the girls who died of radium poisoning was walking to work on a specific day and checked her watch so she wouldn't be late and stumbled but didn't think too much about it. Did the girls really try to be on time? I assume so. Did that particular girl check the time on that particular day? Maybe. Likely. But impossible to know. Did they stumble as they started to get sick? Yes, often. Their bones were shrinking. Did that particular girl stumble on that particular day? How could we know? I understand that Moore is setting up the subtle beginnings of the disease, but there does seem to be a little bit of poetic licensing happening, too. Even so, well worth the read. Excellent prose, thought-provoking, and highly informative.

[sean191 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Moore's in-depth coverage of the girls the story is based on is impressive. It's a story that every American should know because it proves the value of organizations like OSHA and the EPA. However, I thought she interjected her own thoughts/feelings into the writing a bit too much. It feels understandable though since the story is so horrible and shocking. It's worth the read, but as the subtitle warns, it's a "dark story of America's shining women."

[siri51 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Excellent book - research - such a sad story of illness death and corporate negligence

[pepperwings · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

There were definitely some places that dragged in the story for me--but largely because it was a cycle of the same things happening in different locations, overall this is a great book. Lots of good information about the hazards in the workplace and how far companies will go to protect their bottom line.

I'm also surprised how little people understood about radium and plutonium, and how much was glossed over when information started getting out.

[grammapollyreads · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Kate Moore presents a very interesting and engaging history of the radium girls. She starts the story with the infatuation with radium that led to it's use in so many ways. The story then winds it's way into the 1980s when the last of the radium girls died and a movie was made about the subject. Included in this history is the impact the lives and health of these women had on workers rights and legislation. I highly recommend if the reader has an interest in any of these topics.

[booklover1801 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Approximately one hundred years ago, in Newark and Orange, New Jersey, and in Ottawa, Illinois, females in their teens and twenties were delighted when an opportunity arose to make a better-than-average income as dial painters. Each employee was required to brush a luminous substance containing radium on watch and clock dials. To make the process more efficient and precise, their instructors taught the dial painters to place the brushes in their mouths to form a neat point. What the young ladies did not know was that the material they were handling was toxic. After this radioactive element enters one's body, it is a "silent stalker" that triggers changes in the blood and bones, causing severe and irreversible damage. Kate Moore's "The Radium Girls" is a heartbreaking and superbly written book about these unfortunate women and their fight for justice.

To obtain the facts needed to bring "The Radium Girls" to life, Kate Moore drew from primary and secondary sources such as newspaper articles, diaries, official records, and interviews with those who knew the dial painters. Moore points out that the dial painters' bosses reassured their employees that not only was the radium paste safe, but it also improved one's health and appearance! Most of the book is a description of the drawn-out legal jockeying between the companies' high-powered lawyers and the dial painters' attorneys. When they developed alarming symptoms that steadily worsened, the victims needed money to pay their exorbitant medical bills. Even though the companies occasionally offered small settlements, in general, the executives came up with clever tricks to avoid paying anything at all. In spite of their travails, Moore informs us, many of the radium girls displayed admirable "strength, dignity, and courage."

Heightening the story's poignancy, Moore provides personal details of the misery endured by the dial painters' loved ones. Their parents, siblings, spouses, and friends came to realize that--barring a miracle—any human being exposed to so much radium would die in agony. In this skillfully written and riveting account of the evils of greed, immorality, and sexism, Kate Moore offers at least one ray of hope. The court battles and widespread publicity generated by the plight of the radium girls set the stage for occupational safety reforms that, although too late for the dial painters, would save many others from a similar fate.

[jennybeast · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Extremely well researched and well presented history of the Radium girls. I particularly appreciate how well the author centers the story on individual women's experiences. Horrifying story of how industry doesn't value lives, and in fact will falsify as much as possible to avoid paying money out for damages. Yes, the majority of the story takes place in the 20s and 30s, but if you believe that things have changed, take a look at the contaminated water in Detroit, the willingness of the Dakota Access Pipeline to put a major water source at risk, and the gradually unfolding damages wrought by everything from fracking to high fructose corn syrup. I wish it was the nature of humanity to preserve life and care for each other.

Advanced Reader's Copy provided by SourcebooksKids.

[nancynova · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

rabck from waterfalling; I had never heard about this piece of history. I knew that radium was used for clock dials, but never thought about the manufacturing. Tha author starts off strong with the descriptions of the "dial painter" girls, for whom this is a glorious job and because they were never told better, use the luminous paint on their bodies, etc. They walked home covered in it, their clothing was mingled with the families and the hazards were transferred to them too. The girls were also taught the "dip, lip, paint" technique, putting the brush with radium paint in their mouths with every watch or clock they make. When symptoms of radium poisoning start to appear, befuddling the dentists and docs, finally one starts to put the pieces together. The book does start to be repetitive at times.

[maydacat_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

These girls were eager to get their jobs and happy to go to work. They enjoyed the camaraderie of the work place, and the pay was great. It was all wonderful . . . until they started to get sick. The radium girls were taught how to paint the luminous numbers on the faces of the timepieces by putting the brushes into their mouths, and then in the radium-laced paint, and then back in their mouths. Again and again and again. Lip. Dip. Paint. It was called lip-pointing, and they all did it in order to get the fine point needed to paint the numbers. This astonishing story of their jobs, the pain and sickness that followed, and then the lawsuits for justice for these women, is well documented and well told by author Kate Moore. Some of the workers were as young as 14, most were in their late teens or early 20s, and all were female. The horrific agony they endured - teeth falling out, jawbones disintegrating, abscesses, tumors, riddled bones, amputations, unbearable pain, and finally death - are told in this book in a respectful and touching manner. Readers will meet the women and learn of their courage and determination to survive as long as possible, never giving up on themselves or each other. The pain caused by the radium poisoning was one thing, but the pain they endured as they struggled to get the compensation they were due was almost worse. The coldheartedness of the owners of the factories as they tried to deny they were at fault is unbelievable, especially since they knew the radium was dangerous but told the girls it was really good for them. This well researched and riveting story is a sad one, but one that should be read. These women should never be forgotten.

[pferdina · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Very good telling of this history of the young women hired to paint radium on dials to make them glow in the dark.

[bgknighton · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Great history of the fight for justice by girls poisoned by radium. They were among the first to sue for worker's compensation due to gross negligence on the part of radium dial painting company. The effects of their fight resonate through workers' lives today. They paid a high price for the lies of the company. Well told and thorough.

[sblock_16 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A heartbreaking story that needs to be told. I just wish it were better written. Could have really benefited from a good editor.

[niquetteb · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Great account of tragic corporate neglect and the women's lives that were affected.

[mapg.genie · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

OMG, what tragic lives these girls lived! However, because of their courage and persistence, today we have OSHA, workmen's compensation, the EPA, and other groups to help protect people in the workplace as well as in their homes and communities.

Thank you to Kate Moore for thoroughly researching and vividly, sympathetically telling their stories in such poignant detail!

[romymc · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I listened to the Audible edition of this book and thought the author did well telling this tragic story. However, the narrator spoiled it with her perky voice.

[foof2you · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The shocking story of a group of women who painted instrument dials, watch, and clock dials with Radium. At the time Radium was the latest health craze, it was radioactive with a half life 1600 years. When the women started getting sick the powers that be claimed their paint was safe, it was not. This is the women's story of trying to get justice for their industrial injuries.

[daffodilsandpoppies · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I had high hopes for this book, and it started off quite interesting. However, the details of the legal and medical battles the women were going through became repetitive. The book started off as an interesting story and seemed to shift into a list of legal and medical facts. I listened to the audio version and felt like I was just being read a series of notes about each of the women. The graphic details of how the radium adversely affected the women were repeated over and over. I ended up not finishing the book.

[dianekeenoy · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A heartbreaking story of the young girls that worked with radium during the 1920's and 1930's. They were never told how dangerous it was while being trained to paint the dials with a paintbrush that was pointed by being put into their mouths. The pain, disfigurement and deaths of these young women was horrific. Their bravery in making sure the truth was brought out was inspiring.

[adriennealair · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

The story was interesting and important but wow this was so much longer than it needed to be.

[drfuriosa · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Like "The Husband Stitch," this is a saga about being believed. I am infuriated by the way women's health is treated so callously in this country. Corporations nakedly LIED to women about the poisons that were killing them slowly. The more things change, the more they remain the same.

As a piece of history, this book is absolutely worth the read. It liberates silenced voices and illustrates, once again, the need for fair and safe working conditions everywhere.

As a text, I feel like this book needed another solid round of edits. The writing is impassioned, but a little elementary (I lost count of superlative adverbs, like very and extremely). It is an engaging read, however, and I found myself haunted by these ghostly women sacrificed to the corporate altar.

[stevesbookstuff · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I listened to the audio book. A worthwhile story, but also one that was hard to hear. The pain and suffering the women highlighted in the book went through, along with the complete disregard for that pain, and the active evading of responsibility by the company make for difficult subject matter. And, while the women are portrayed as triumphing in the end, that triumph really only amounted to the words of the judge, and a very nominal payment.

The story was well told and the audio book reader did a fantastic job, but in the end I felt my expectations and the author's interest in telling the story were at odds. It was her goal to emphasize the women themselves, and the impact the radium poisoning had on their lives and those of their families. I definitely appreciated that, but felt that at least some sense of the larger story would have been helpful in setting some context and would have helped to solidify the author's case for the importance of the fight the Radium Girls had waged. None of that larger context really comes until the epilogue, and focuses solely on the later relevance of the women's experience to radiation impacts during the nuclear era.

Also, and perhaps this is a minor point, but the use of the term "girls" throughout the book put me off. While many of the women profiled were in fact girls when they started working, and while I understand the usage of the term was perhaps appropriate at the time, to hear an author today use the term when not quoting from materials from the time was jarring to me.

[kohrmanmj · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Kate Moore took what could have been a compelling story and instead spat out a litany of facts in a redundant, lengthy fashion. With a good editor, better storytelling, and a cohesive narrative flow, this could have been a fabulous book. Instead it read like a 400 page Wikipedia article. If you are interested in this story, there are parts worth skimming.

[cherybear · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

It's a story that should be told. Young women wanted to work in the factories that used radium paint--mostly for clock dials that glowed in the dark, but also for instruments used by pilots in the war. Like so many "new" things, radium was hailed as a wonderful thing, and was even used in cosmetics, toothpaste, and other products. But the women who painted the dials were surrounded by the material every day, and were told it was very safe. They were taught to put their brushes in their lips to make the point of the brush even smaller for painting the dials. They loved the camaraderie, and the pay. But soon, many of them began to fall ill--and for years had to struggle to be taken seriously by doctors and lawyers, even as the radium industry continued to deny the cause of their misery. Not much has been written about this chapter of American history, and Moore's book is the first to try to tell the story of the "girls" themselves in their own words.

[annawaffles · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book broke my heart.

[bookworm12_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Absolutely horrific. This is a nonfiction account of the women who were poisoned by the radium in the paint they used in their work. As their jawbones crumbled and they had their limbs amputated, doctors continued to tell them they were fine. They were strong, brave and changed the game for so many others. The companies were devious and selfish. It’s a heartbreaking but engrossing book and the author puts a human face on the suffering.

[cathyskye · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

After reading Moore's The Woman They Could Not Silence and having it be one of my Best Reads of the Year, I remembered that I had a copy of Radium Girls, so I had to read it, too. Guess what? Radium Girls is also one of my Best Reads of the Year, which means that whenever Kate Moore has a new book published, I'm buying it.

Moore's writing style brings all the people involved, all the facts, to life. Reading from today's more enlightened perspective, what people were doing with radium in the early twentieth century was not only nauseating but horrifying. (For example, the radium waste from the dial-painting factories looked like sand, so it was offloaded to schools for their playground sandboxes.) But, you have to cut them some slack. These people didn't realize the time bomb they were treating so cavalierly. That all changed once it became known how deadly radium is.

The corporate greed shown boggled the mind as well as the legal wranglings to avoid having their profits cut into. The unbridled greed wasn't surprising, and neither was the difference in the companies' reactions to what was done when it was discovered male lab workers were becoming ill versus what was done when the female dial painters became ill.

Moore outlines just what these young women had to endure, both physically and mentally, as they fought for justice. And what a group of women! Knowing it was already too late for them, they continued to fight their legal battles for those who would follow after them. What makes this piece of history even more poignant is how Moore brings each woman to life. These women weren't just court cases with gruesome physical wounds; Moore reminds readers how pretty they were. How they liked to spend those high wages they were making. The clothes and hats they liked to wear. How they loved parties and planned for their weddings and dreamed of the children they would have. How they laughed and loved and found strength they didn't even know they had. In showing how they lived, not just how they died, Moore puts the heart and soul into this chapter of history-- and makes it a chapter we should all know and remember.

Kate Moore, thank you for bringing Catherine Wolfe Donohue, Katherine Schaub, Grace Fryer, Margaret Looney, Pearl Payne, and the other Radium Girls back into the spotlight. Their stories should never be forgotten.

[linyarai · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I really enjoyed how educational this book was, I had no idea radium was used so recently and there was so much debate over it. I liked how the girls fought for compensation and the laws that changed accordingly.