Summary of Kate Moore's The Radium Girls

By IRB Media

Get the Summary of Kate Moore's The Radium Girls in 20 minutes. Please note: This is a summary & not the original book. Original book introduction: The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women by Kate Moore is a gruesome account of the effects of radium on young women who worked with radium-based paint in the first part of the twentieth century. Centering on two exploitative radium plants in Orange, New Jersey and Ottawa, Illinois, the sad story follows the lives and deaths of female workers who became known as the radium girls.

Radium has been known to be a dangerous substance since 1901, but it wasn't always widely recognized as such. This was for a lot of reasons, including the fragmented medical community, a lack of regulation in the United States, and the general sense of awe surrounding radium, which was then known as a miraculous material. When a watch dial-painting studio opened in Newark, New Jersey in 1916, young women in their teens and twenties clamored to work there. Little did they know the radium-based paint they used would poison their bodies and, eventually, steal their lives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Feb 6, 2021
• ISBN: 9781638153467

IRB Media

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Book preview

Analysis

of

Kate Moore’s

The Radium Girls

The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women

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Overview

The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women (2017) by Kate Moore tells how young women won a landmark workers’ compensation case against employers who hired them to work with radium. Moore traces the history of the so-called radium girls’ employment, illnesses, and deaths. She probes why, and how, their lives were lost even though radium had been a known poison since 1901.

In 1917, a company called Radium Luminous Material Corporation (RLMC) opened a studio in Newark, New Jersey, where women painted luminous watch dials, which were in high demand during World War I. Knowledge regarding the harmful effects of radium was more or less restricted to the scientific community, where understanding was fragmented. Still, at least one of