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A review by cuteasamuntin
The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women by Kate Moore
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
5.0
I think the first time I cried while reading this was only a chapter or two in. At some point, I simply didn’t bother to wipe my eyes anymore. I found myself filled with righteous anger and furious anguish, unable to find my footing in the accustomed professional distance I have cultivated in my own career as a historian. Please note that the rest of this review contains spoilers consisting of readily-available historical information and references.
Going into this book, I had a passing familiarity with the Radium Girls and a pre-existing understanding of the long history of companies disregarding the welfare of their employees and customers in the name of profit. I thought I understood the Radium Girls’ role in the US developing stronger workers’ safety protections, accompanied by the description of teenage girls painting their teeth and nails with radium paint so they would glow. I knew they were lied to and that they died, but I’d always had the vague impression that it was perhaps 20 or so young women who died of radiation poisoning before they reached 30.
Kate Moore did an incredible job of honoring the lives and memories of the many, many women who were lied to, irreparably harmed, and emotionally abused and gaslit by their employers from the moment their work began in the early 1920s through their deaths at ages ranging from their teens to their nineties. Moore’s rage and grief at the injustice done to the America’s “ghost girls” is palpable throughout. Unlike I’ve experienced with many other works of popular history, I found this to bolster, rather than detract from, the narrative as it unfolded.
I was both professionally impressed and personally moved by Moore’s dedication to thorough research through compiling existing primary sources and performing her own oral history interviews of people related to the Radium Girls. She synthesized these sources into a cohesive and compelling narrative of US labor history. Moore clearly delineates between known facts and her own conjectures of intimate details or internal thoughts based on available evidence. Rather than distracting, I found Moore’s frequent integration of direct quotations from archival materials and her own interviews to be a powerful tool that also made me more willing to trust the points where she had to guess at missing details or the internal workings of the entities involved in this history.
While the work is densely packed with both immediately vital and contextually relevant but tangential information, I did not at any point find the major points obscured or the pacing to be slow or bogged down.
I find I have few words of my own to describe the companies who knew they were poisoning their employees and the towns around them, then lied, slandered, and cheated these people into their early, irradiated graves. Over 100 years later, we are still cleaning up after them. This book is a well-deserved memorial for the women whose pain and suffering led to better protections for workers and the entirety of the American public. May their memories be a blessing.
Going into this book, I had a passing familiarity with the Radium Girls and a pre-existing understanding of the long history of companies disregarding the welfare of their employees and customers in the name of profit. I thought I understood the Radium Girls’ role in the US developing stronger workers’ safety protections, accompanied by the description of teenage girls painting their teeth and nails with radium paint so they would glow. I knew they were lied to and that they died, but I’d always had the vague impression that it was perhaps 20 or so young women who died of radiation poisoning before they reached 30.
Kate Moore did an incredible job of honoring the lives and memories of the many, many women who were lied to, irreparably harmed, and emotionally abused and gaslit by their employers from the moment their work began in the early 1920s through their deaths at ages ranging from their teens to their nineties. Moore’s rage and grief at the injustice done to the America’s “ghost girls” is palpable throughout. Unlike I’ve experienced with many other works of popular history, I found this to bolster, rather than detract from, the narrative as it unfolded.
I was both professionally impressed and personally moved by Moore’s dedication to thorough research through compiling existing primary sources and performing her own oral history interviews of people related to the Radium Girls. She synthesized these sources into a cohesive and compelling narrative of US labor history. Moore clearly delineates between known facts and her own conjectures of intimate details or internal thoughts based on available evidence. Rather than distracting, I found Moore’s frequent integration of direct quotations from archival materials and her own interviews to be a powerful tool that also made me more willing to trust the points where she had to guess at missing details or the internal workings of the entities involved in this history.
While the work is densely packed with both immediately vital and contextually relevant but tangential information, I did not at any point find the major points obscured or the pacing to be slow or bogged down.
I find I have few words of my own to describe the companies who knew they were poisoning their employees and the towns around them, then lied, slandered, and cheated these people into their early, irradiated graves. Over 100 years later, we are still cleaning up after them. This book is a well-deserved memorial for the women whose pain and suffering led to better protections for workers and the entirety of the American public. May their memories be a blessing.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Body horror, Chronic illness, Death, Terminal illness, Medical content, Grief, Gaslighting, and Injury/Injury detail
Minor: Bullying, Cancer, Gore, Infertility, Miscarriage, Misogyny, Blood, Death of parent, Fire/Fire injury, and War
Moderate to graphic descriptions of the effects of radiation, dental and medical procedures, acute and chronic infections, privacy violations, radioactive pollution, and criminal neglect of worker safety.