The Radium Girls should be on your feminist non-fiction must-reads list. It is the heartbreaking, frustrating, and infuriating story of women poisoned, misled, and swept under the rug until death by their employers. A story of a mystery illness that few doctors and dentists cared to investigate, applying band-aid solutions that aided in the deterioration of their patient’s lives. It is a story chronic illness patients knows all too well. A story any woman will be familiar with and enraged by how little has changed.
The Radium Girls begins during WWI, when dials legible at night are in high demand. These small dials require finesse to paint. The women are taught a simple procedure to do this: put the paint brush to their lips and turn the bristles to a perfect point. Dip the brush in radium paint, then paint the dial. Lip, dip, paint. When the women leave the factory in the evening, they shine and glimmer much like the dials they’ve painted. Radium is everywhere.
In the decades that follow, the women who worked in those factories begin dying in the most horrific way imaginable.
Lip. Dip. Paint. Die.
I quite enjoyed The Radium Girls, written by Kate Moore. I highly recommend picking it up. In spite of this, I do have to rate it only 3/5 stars. While this book is non-fiction, it reads like many partially dramatized documentaries. There are large sections full of well researched facts, followed by sections that read like a fiction thriller. We read the daydreams and body language of people long dead, who couldn’t possibly tell the author what they happened to be thinking or feeling on a particular day. If these were stories told to the author by the children or grandchildren of these women, that would be different. That isn’t the impression I’ve left with after reading this book. I would have enjoyed reading stories of the survivors from their descendants, but there are no such interviews within The Radium Girls.