The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women (Kate Moore)

When one of my bookie friends told me about The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women, her verbal summary simultaneously appalled and intrigued me. Who couldn’t pay attention to such an account of astonishing corporate greed and coverups, unscrupulous deception, and grotesque deaths?

Radium Girls is set from 1917 through 1939 in two American towns – Orange, New Jersey, and Ottawa, Illinois. In these towns, respectively, stood the factories of the Radium Luminous Materials Corporation and the Radium Dial Company, where luminescent dials for watches and instrument panels were produced. The companies hired young girls, mostly aged from their mid-teens through early twenties, to hand-paint the tiny numbers on the dials with radium paint, hence the luminescence. It was a coveted job in their communities, the highest paying opportunity for young ladies at that time. The girls had to work fast and precisely. In order to form a superfine point on the paintbrushes, they were instructed to “lip point,” in other words, to moisten and shape the brush hairs with their mouths. Having achieved the requisite fine point, the girls would then dip the brush in the radium paint, paint a numeral, then put the brush directly back to their lips to reform the point. “Lip, dip, paint. Lip, dip, paint.” Over and over. All day long. Every day. Deliberately and directly ingesting radium.

Dial painter with radium
induced growth

At this time in history, the dangers of radium, which had only been discovered in 1898, were known but underestimated. The luminescent paint was thought to be harmless since the quantities of radium were so small. In fact, radium was so poorly understood that it had become a fad health treatment, and the girls’ employers assured them that the paint was not only harmless, but beneficial. “Radium will put rosy cheeks on you,” they were told. Oblivious, the girls would playfully dust their faces with the dry paint base, then go out in the evenings, glowing in the darkness. The shining girls with the glamorous jobs were the envy of their communities.

A few years later, the painters began suffering debilitating symptoms – aggressive tooth infections, jawbone disintegration, tumors on faces, loss of hip motion, etc. No doctors had ever seen ailments like these, especially in such young and previously healthy girls. Some physicians believed radium poisoning was the cause and urged the girls to quit their jobs. A few even conducted experiments and scientifically confirmed that the girls were radioactive. But as the powerful company-appointed doctors and lawyers denied any workplace association, girl after girl was accused of being a “nervous case” or given misdiagnoses such as syphilis and phossy jaw (necrosis of the jaw from overexposure to phosphorus). The dial painters kept suffering. Their medical bills surged. One after the other, they died, and their families were left destitute. Yet their employers were unswayed. 

Kate Moore
(photo from theradiumgirls.com)

In Radium Girls, Kate Moore details the dial painters’ struggle and ultimate victory, at enormous cost, over powerful businessmen. She illustrates the criticality of governmental regulation to mitigate the threat of capitalistic greed. Moore’s writing style tends toward the journalistic. It’s factual, fully annotated, and undramatized. The stories of individual dial painters coalesce and compound to form a juggernaut that drives this book forward. And of course, an underdog win always satisfies. Moore follows the girls’ stories with an epilogue that brings us to the current-day environmental repercussions of the factories’ recklessness, and the regulatory and scientific advances that the girls effected.

Radium Girls is the book that brought me back to my blog after a two-and-a-half year hiatus. That’s how important it is. I hope you’ll buy it, read it, and share it.

Check it out on Amazon!