There is no relation afterward she is a perfect stranger.” It worked. Moore includes page after page of these heartless statements, including one from 1935 in which a company lawyer admitted radium killed one of the painters, Irene La Porte, but said that because she had quit, “all duty we had to that girl as our employee ceased. Their employers continued to turn them away, referring to them as a “menace” and blaming “women’s clubs” for the painters’ audacity to try to uncover the truth. “The element was dubbed ‘Liquid Sunshine,’ ” Moore writes, and “on sale were radium jockstraps and lingerie, radium butter, radium milk,” and some people even drank it – unimaginable in this post-nuclear age.īy the mid-1920s, the sick dial painters began to put two and two together. The industry’s spin doctors made sure their view of radium’s miraculous powers quashed any bad news. were told repeatedly that radium wasn’t dangerous, even though warnings about radioactivity had been trickling out since 1906. They wasted away, just teens and young newlyweds, as families and doctors stood by, helpless. Their jaws splintered in the hands of their dentists. And the suffering was incredible: Their teeth fell out. Moore honors the lives of the painters – as well as their horrifying deaths – in her compelling chronicle of women whose work maimed and killed them while their employers, their doctors and their government turned a blind eye to their suffering. “When I would go home at night, my clothing would shine in the dark,” said Edna Bolz, one of the dial painters we come to know in Kate Moore’s new book, “The Radium Girls.” It contained radium, a highly radioactive element, and the stuff was inescapable. The paint that the workers were using in the first decades of the 20th century was not ordinary. So the painters did just as their bosses showed them, and pinched the bristles between their lips or teeth to get a superfine point for painting each number. The numbers on the wristwatches and clock dials were so tiny, the workers needed a very fine brush to complete their work. If you purchase this book through the links above I will earn a small fee at no additional cost to you.The young women sat in rows, heads bent, painting numbers on paper watch and clock faces with luminous paint. Please note: this post contains Amazon and B&N affiliate links. Have you heard of The Radium Girls and/or read the book? Do tell! I need to watch it when it becomes available to the public. It seems that it was showcased at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival. I rented it on Vimeo for $0.99 and got to “meet” some of the women highlighted in the book, as well as the small town – just outside of Chicago – of Ottawa, IL (one of the factory sites).Īlso during my research I found a Radium Girls film on. I immediately found the documentary, Radium City, that inspired Kate Moore to write this book. 392) I was still fired up when I finished that I needed to know more. Okay going back to not knowing about these women: how was that possible when their legal battles “ ultimately led to the establishment of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which now works nationally in the United States to ensure safe working conditions.” (pg. And as the fatal poison of the radium takes hold, the brave shining girls find themselves embroiled in one of the biggest scandals of America’s early 20th century, and in a groundbreaking battle for workers’ rights that will echo for centuries to come. With such a coveted job, these “shining girls” are the luckiest alive - until they begin to fall mysteriously ill.īut the factories that once offered golden opportunities are now ignoring all claims of the gruesome side effects, and the women’s cries of corruption. The glittering chemical covers their bodies from head to toe they light up the night like industrious fireflies. Meanwhile, hundreds of girls toil amidst the glowing dust of the radium-dial factories. From body lotion to tonic water, the popular new element shines bright in the otherwise dark years of the First World War. The Curies’ newly discovered element of radium makes gleaming headlines across the nation as the fresh face of beauty, and wonder drug of the medical community.
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