The Radium Girls

This is a well-researched book. A VERY well researched book.

It’s also well written, and reads almost like a work of fiction, especially in the beginning.

There're loads of things I didn’t know, and much of it is immensely fascinating. It’s shocking to read what people honestly believed in those days, and more than once I found myself shaking my head and going, “No, guys, that’s not a good idea.”

Then, towards the end of Part Two, it just started getting a bit long in a tooth (if you’ve read the book, you might catch that pun), and more than a bit heavy. I think that “heaviness” is, at least in part, because it’s around that time in the book that the author strays from the “naked facts” and starts giving her own opinion. I don’t like it when authors and journalists do that — and it’s why I follow very few online news sources; there is far too much editorialising for my taste. When I read something like this, I want the facts, not the writer’s interpretation of the facts.

Of facts, though, there are plenty. There’s a massive acknowledgments section in the back of the book, and the Notes are well over a hundred pages long. The author cites every source, crosses every t, and dots every i. I also enjoyed the many, many photographs, which let me put faces to names and see almost first-hand the terrible progression of the disease.

Which also serves to drive home my point about the author’s own opinion: I can see for myself how bad things were. I don’t need the author to tell me how terrible SHE thought they were.

Click here to find out where you can get your hands on a copy: books2read.com/u/47rpEj

* Note: That's an affiliate link, so if you click through to a store and end up buying anything, I might earn a commission from your purchase.

I'd known about the Radium Girls as a chemist since undergraduate university in the late 1990s. When I learned there was a book coming out about them, I was excited to read it. I'd love to say this book didn't disappoint, but it kind of does.

First, I'd like to point out that this review contains "spoilers" except I don't believe anything with historical reference can be spoiled. You either know the history or you don't. This leads me to one of the irksome parts of this book - the author tries to build suspense, but since I knew what happened overall, although not the details, it felt forced and odd. I'll start out by referencing the recent HBO series "Chernobyl" which is also a piece of history that I'm familiar with. I knew from reading what happened at the plant, but the way the story was told and the history portrayed, suspense was built in an excellent way. It was great drama based upon a horrific piece of history. I believe Moore was trying to achieve that, and failed.

However, I was hooked by the first chapter of this book. By page 45, I was enthusiastic. Unfortunately, I have read books that start amazing and fall short, so I was preparing for that to happen here. Another of my complaints is that the tone of the book changes about page 100. The factual historical-telling turned a bit more historical fiction-telling with author inserted commentary. I did not enjoy that aspect of the book. She spends about 200 pages in the middle of the book doing this. The last 100 pages pick up and are better. The middle tends to be a bit of a slog.

I have an online bookgroup with very relaxed rules. If you read a book and want to discuss, anyone who has read it will discuss. Sometimes others read the book and you pick up the discussion months later. We discussed this book when I started it. One journalist friend mentioned that she couldn't finish the book. She tried both print and audiobook versions. In the end, her higher standard for how a journalist tells a historical story just meant she couldn't get through it. I have a colleague that I mentioned I was reading this book to. She was super enthusiastic and recommends it to all her friends for reading. She thought it was wonderful. In fact, she didn't take my critique of the book too well, and dismissed my own concerns and difficulties with it. Obviously, this book has a your-mileage-may-vary aspect to it among well-read science and journalist folks.

The book is well enough written. In the first hundred pages and the last hundred pages, I would even say well-written. Because the middle two hundred pages are difficult with a different tone, I can't say that portion is well written at all. One complaint from everyone (including my enthusiastic friend) was that the cast was too large. I get that. There were hundreds of affected women. However, the book does its best when it introduces just a handful of women in the beginning and focuses on the story of one woman with her few friends in the end. Unfortunately, these are not the same groups of women. I feel that there must have been a better way to tell this story that did not single out only a couple women so one could see how many were affected by radium and the business use of it, but still focused small enough that the story flowed and did not slog in the middle. Related to this is that one person I spoke with kept calling the affected women "characters." In historical journalism books, these aren't characters. These are real people. There's a huge disservice that happened in the telling if someone walks away from this book calling the real-life people "characters."

My book happens to have a list of reading group questions at the end. These are the most awful questions. They are poorly written by someone who has zero grasp of chemistry, history, or women. A friend and I guessed they were written by a rich man in publishing who hadn't read the book, possibly he skimmed it. And if that is not an accurate description of the person who wrote the questions, they should be ashamed of themselves for writing such poor questions. My online book group tore the questions apart.

All these critiques aside, this story needed to be told. And I would recommend an abridged version of this book become required reading in high school chemistry classes. Why chemistry? Because radium is an element and what scientists and businessmen (specifically in this case) do with something they did not fully understand, and the excruciating, horrific suffering and loss of life because of their callousness and lack of compassion and understanding is something that people studying science need to know at an early age.

One conversation we had in my book group was, ironically inspired by the terrible reading group questions at the back, could this happen again? And our answer said in today's (2019) political climate - Absolutely! Because humans do stupid things when they don't understand the consequences, don't care about other human beings, are greedy, etc. This is not the fault of the women who worked and did as they were told, it is the fault of the scientists who did not put up their warnings, and the businesses and government who did not abide by the warnings that were given. This is a cautionary tale. We should never think this couldn't happen again.

Overall, I recommend this book. If you struggle after page 100, skip to page 300 and pretend its a different book with the same basic premise and a new group of people to focus on. This book sticks with you. I was thinking about the women and their specific suffering and lives even when not reading this book. I think some of it will stay with me and I will reflect upon for a long time.

After radium was discovered by the Curies in 1898, it was considered a wonder chemical, curing cancer, glowing in the dark and invigorating the health of those who imbibed it. As we know today, radium is radioactive and incredibly dangerous. In 1920s America, two factories employed young women to apply luminous paint onto watches and military equipment. This is the story of those girls.

You would be a hard-hearted soul not to shed a single tear over The Radium Girls. We know a lot about the effects of ingested radiation now because of these women, but at the time that thought would hardly be a comfort to their suffering. It's a heart-breaking and riveting read, and one I would recommend to anyone with an interest in radiation, occupational diseases, industrial lawsuits or social justice.

Everyone wanted to work in the dial painting studios. Young women who had the skill could easily make more money than their peers and there was an element of glamour surrounding them. When the women stepped out at night, their clothes and skin would glow. No one worried, radium was said to be good for you, and they weren't provided any specialist equipment to work with it. In order to get a fine enough tip on their brushes to be accurate, the women would dampen them in their mouths. Yes, that's right, they were putting radioative paint into their mouths. I was seriously gobsmacked at the cavalier attitude reading the first few chapters.

You could forgive the companies for not knowing in the early days but as the cases pile up, their ignorance is breath-taking, turning into gross negliance when they knew very well what they were doing. The women didn't matter much to them, they could always employ more, and there is always this feeling that they thought no one would believe a bunch of working class girls anyway.

One by one the women fell ill. Doctors and dentists were mystified but the cases weren't connected for a long time as the radiation poisoning manifested in different ways. The suffering of the women is hard to read, as the radium acted like calcium, being transported into their bones to do its worst. The death certificates never identified the culprit, never said that their occupation was to blame. The companies had plausible deniability.

To add insult to injury, the medical bills financially crippled the affected families. With the women unable to work, some of them turned to lawyers to try and make the companies take responsibility. Having got to the end of this book I can undoubtedly say the people in charge were evil. They ignored the advice of scientists, they continued letting girls put paint into their mouths because it was less wasteful (of paint not of human lives), then they denied this was what they told the girls to do. They demanded medical examinations and then never shared the damning results with their employees. They lied and lied and lied, all the while whilst their ex-employees were dying by their hands.

There are reasons industies are regulated. Those who wish to deregulate it should maybe read into the history of worker compensation. The radium girls' legacy is one of better workers' rights and more respect for the dangers of radiation.

I'm not even going to object to the use of girls in the title. They were so young when they started working, many only teenagers eager to be independent women. So many didn't even reach twenty-five. I feel like crying just thinking about it. Need to put your emotions through the ringer? Read this book.