Book Review: The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women
Recently at my company (Stout), we've started our monthly Book Club back up. I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to jump back into blogging about the books I'm reading. If you've been here before, welcome back! If you haven't, well, the only thing you need to know about me is that I am obsessed with reading. Literature has molded my life in so many ways, and I attribute a lot of my personality and knowledge to this lifelong love.
We started off strong with a really emotional and telling account of a true, yet strange phenomenon between the 1920's and 1950's. Radium companies in Orange, NJ and Ottawa, IL employed numerous girls and women to paint watch dials with radium-based paint. Business was booming due to the war at the time, and the dial paint was luminescent, which was a necessity for the dials located in military vehicles.
Surprisingly, no protective attire was required for the girls since radium was believed to be the 'miracle mineral,' boasting good health and added years to a lifespan. (A little background: Radium was discovered in 1902 by Marie and Pierre Curie. At the time, it was confirmed that it was radioactive, which makes the cases of the girls versus their employers even more concerning. With just a little research, radioactivity poisoning would not even be a question when examining the makeup of the paint and element itself.) The girls used a process with paintbrushes called 'lip-pointing,' where they would wet the brush with their mouths, dip into the paint, then point the bristles with their lips to create a very exact thin point. Over time, as one can imagine, the girls ingested this paint without knowing what it would further do to their bodies.
A small TW: bodily harm.
Eventually the girl's bones, teeth, and jaws would begin to disintegrate. Some of the early girls' teeth started to fall out, and then pieces of their jaws would essentially just...break off. Other girls started developing sarcomas in their knees and legs. They began going to doctor after doctor, who were just as stumped as they were.
I won't give the ending/meat of the book way, but dang! This was a wild ride and honestly reverberates so many corporate practices that we still see today involving employee injuries.
For my personal viewpoints: I truly loved the story. It was written like a historical fiction novel, but I could have done without the writer's style. I would have loved to have seen this written by someone with more of a natural story-telling writing style, i.e. Jon Krakauer. Many parts were hard to read, and even harder to imagine that this all actually happened, and on such a large and heartbreaking scale. So many families were affected, children left without mothers and husbands left without wives. I would recommend this to anyone who loves historical nonfiction, or even historical fiction.
❤ | C
