A review by camiclarkbooks
The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women by Kate Moore

dark informative slow-paced

4.0

This was probably not the book to read while dealing with unexplained, debilitating knee pain because it did have me wondering if I’d been exposed to copious amounts of radium (I was not). 

“The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women” by Kate Moore was the thoroughly well researched story of the women who worked as watch dial painters during the late-1910s and 1920s. It was a glamorous, well-paying job. But little did the women know there was a terrible price to pay for working with paint made from luminous radium…

Moore’s book focuses on the women, giving them a voice for the first time in years. She shares with the reader the complete stories of the women across the United States who worked as dial painters, from the charmed lives they led while employed by the watch manufacturing companies to the horrible turn their health took just years later. Moore doesn’t shy away from the bleakest parts of their stories, or from the horrors of how their bodies literally began to fall apart. 

The book was a fascinating look into a part of women’s labour history that I didn’t know much anything about. It was told in a way that blended firsthand accounts and interviews with information gleaned from newspapers and internal reports. The combination resulted in a knowledgeable story that humanized the women rather than just regulating them to be a forgotten part of history. 
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