![]() ![]() M oore’s writing is simple and straightforward the book would be appropriate for middle schoolers as well as more seasoned readers. Their eventual court case began a legacy of labor standards that persist today, and directly inspired scientists working on the Manhattan Project decades later to implement safety precautions against radiation exposure. Nor were they just victims, as Moore makes clear they were champions of women’s rights, workers’ rights, public health, and environmental justice. These details not only add color but make it all the more horrifying when these optimistic, happy, youthful girls fall ill and decay - and all the more satisfying when victims (aided by an assortment of doctors, lawyers, and state workers, some of them women) begin to fight back. “A foot taller than Albina” - her older sister, who also worked at the dial-painting factory in Newark - Mollie “was a sociable 19-year-old with a broad face and bouffant brown hair, often seen laughing with her colleagues.” Mollie Maggia “seemed to have found her calling at the studio, being unusually productive,” Moore writes. While Moore’s book is by no means an exhaustive chronicle (she says she finished it in record time, spending about four months researching and one month writing), she managed to track down a wealth of details that tie the narrative together and bring its characters back to life. (Blum is the publisher of Undark, which takes its name from von Sochocky’s paint.) And in Kurt Vonnegut’s 1979 novel “Jailbird,” the protagonist reveals that “one of the four women I have ever loved in this Vale of Tears” was the daughter of a dial painter who succumbed to radium poisoning. Deborah Blum touches on the radium girls’ story in her 2011 book “The Poisoner’s Handbook,” and in follow-up articles in PLoS Blogs and Wired. Moore’s book is a colorful complement to Claudia Clark’s pioneering “Radium Girls: Women and Industrial Health Reform, 1910-1935,” published in 1997, which chronicles the women’s fight as it led into the larger industrial health movement. Workers at Radium Dial Company in Ottawa, Illinois, began falling ill in the 1930s. Yet for as long as they could, these companies dodged and denied, concealed and covered up. Radium Corporation and inventor of the paint used in the dial factories, sawed off the tip of his own finger when he realized it had become poisoned with radium. Moore catalogs damning evidence that the higher-ups knew better. Over and over, their supervisors told them no, it was safe - healthy, even. Many were hesitant, asking whether the radium could harm them. To paint the watch dials, the young women were taught to form the bristles of their fine paintbrushes into a sharp point by moistening them in their mouths. It was a cure-all for well-to-do patients and a tonic for the healthy, who consumed radium in pills, creams, ointments, toothpaste, lipstick - even radium-infused jockstraps. By the early 1900s, when these two companies opened up shop, and throughout the Roaring Twenties, a radium frenzy seized the world’s imagination. When Marie and Pierre Curie discovered radium at the turn of the century, it was hailed as a miracle substance for its effectiveness in treating some cancers and tumors. Their bodies glowed like ghosts, even after many washings, sometimes for years. The radium powder that made their paint luminous, allowing the watch faces and hands to glow in the dark, was expensive it made them feel glamorous to have a coat of it dusting their hair, skin, and clothing after a day’s work. The girls found their jobs - hand-painting watch dials for the Radium Luminous Materials Corporation in northern New Jersey, and the Radium Dial Company in Ottawa, Illinois - to be artistic, technically challenging, and economically empowering. Many were daughters and granddaughters of immigrants who had come to America in search of work. In a new book, “The Radium Girls,” the British author Kate Moore tells the story of dozens of young women like Mollie Maggia. By fall, the disease spread to her jugular vein, causing her to hemorrhage violently and die in agony. He gently prodded it, and to his shock the entire jawbone broke off in his hand. On this day in May, she told him her jaw had been aching more than usual. Knef, an expert on mouth diseases, had never seen anything like it. BOOK REVIEW - “The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women,” by Kate Moore ![]()
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