The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women

The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women by Kate Moore

Hard as it may be to fathom, once upon a time (the early 1900s), radium was thought of as a miracle substance, enhancing all it touched. And so companies flooded the market with products like radium makeup, radium water, radium butter, radium toothpaste, and radium paint. The last was used by the young women who painted luminescent numerals on watch dials (a tool that became all-important to the war effort), though they also snuck some paint now and then to paint their nails, their dresses, even sometimes in sillier moments their teeth and faces. They had no idea, of course, that they were poisoning themselves, and the story of the devastation that poison wreaked on their bodies, and their subsequent fight for compensation from the companies who knew of the substance’s danger makes for compelling, infuriating, heartbreaking reading in Kate Moore’s meticulously researched The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women.

One of the many strengths of Moore’s book is the way in which she brings these young women alive, giving us glimpses into their lives, describing their “jaunty” walk or “twinkly blue eyes and fashionably bobbed hair,” their hopes and dreams, their families. Because of just how alive they are on the page, The Radium Girls is replete with moments of poignancy, as when, for instance, young Katherine Shaub on her first day of work at Radium Luminous Materials Corporation notes how “the [radium-laced] powder got everywhere; there was dust 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… it made the girls themselves gleam.”

This was no poetic turn of phrase. The girls literally glowed thanks to their work, the powder covering their clothes and working its way underneath onto their skin. At night they “glowed even brighter from the radium against the dark windows: a workshop of shining spirits laboring through the night.” Time and again the girls revel in this unique “perk” of the job, playing silly games in dark rooms, wearing their good dresses to work so they’d shine later at whatever party they were attending. Coming from the modern perspective of knowing just how dangerous radium is, each time you read of them giggling over the powder’s effect, or being called the “ghost girls” as the townspeople sometimes did, or of them painting their nails and cheeks, you want to reach into the book’s pages, reach through time and tell them to stop, warn them that they were killing themselves all the more quickly.

But of course you can’t. And so soon you reach the horrifying consequences, which — fair warning — Moore does not shy away from detailing. The effects first showed up in the teeth, and soon one girl after the other was visiting their dentist complaining of pain in their mouth. The dentists dutifully removed what seemed to be “the bad tooth,” but the pain continued, even spread, and soon the dentists were removing even more teeth, or worse, the teeth were falling out themselves, along with pieces of the their jaw. The torment is unrelenting for these poor women, and you can’t help but ache for them as they suffer for a reason that is a complete mystery to them.

Though perhaps not to everyone. Because as the medical problem proliferate, Moore’s attention turns to the two companies most involved and their attempts to disassociate themselves from any culpability. As much as the girls’ plight breaks your heart, the companies’ actions will infuriate you as Moore details the their lies and stonewalling once the girls are forced to sue to try and get some financial help for their steep medical costs. I confess, at several points during this section my margin notes deteriorated to simply scrawling “assholes” next to particularly egregious actions by the company executives or lawyers.

All of this — the girls getting hired, their first few wonderful years of independence and uniqueness, the deterioration of their bodies, the fight against the company — is tautly, sharply related in economical fashion. Even better, that economy doesn’t rob The Radium Girls of style, as Moore’s prose is vivid throughout and peppered with some beautifully lyric moments, such as one of the moments where she describes how the radium powder made the girls glow: “The girls shone like the watches did in the darkroom, as though they themselves were timepieces, counting down the seconds as they passed. They glowed like ghosts as they walked home through the streets of Orange.” Or when a doctor overlooks a clue when a set of X-rays he pulls from a drawer were fogged from having been stored with a few scraps of jawbone from one of the girls: “it was a message, though little did Knef know it, but its meaning was unclear. Mollie Maggia was still voiceless, even after all this time.”

The Radium Girls should be mandatory reading for anyone arguing against “intrusive job-killing” workplace regulations, seeing as how the lack of such regulations made “killing” a reality rather than a metaphor. And in fact, the girls’ historic court case led to some of the earliest laws protecting workers from dangerous job conditions. But Moore doesn’t allow the women at the center of this story to simply stand as statistics or abstract examples. As they, one after the other, die horribly lingering deaths at 19, 22, or 24, you feel each loss of a living, breathing girl cut down in the prime of her life. Each its own tragedy that infuriatingly could have been prevented. I won’t soon forget the Radium Girls, either the book or the girls themselves.

~Bill Capossere

A brilliant work of nonfiction, not to be missed. Kate Moore brings each woman vividly to life so that we feel the weight of each loss. There are triumphs, too, but always tinged with sorrow, since some of the women didn’t live to be vindicated and others were too ill to enjoy their victories for long. The Radium Girls is beautifully written and as suspenseful as any legal thriller, and even more compelling because it’s all true.

~Kelly Lasiter