There was a period of time around 2017 or 2018 when I received at least one gifted copy of The Radium Girls for every major holiday or event. I had a bookshelf lined with them, and I would often stick one in a Little Free Library or pass them on to friends. Obviously, this wasn’t a bad thing, but for some reason it never translated into me actually reading Moore’s book until this summer. There were always more pressing reads, I suppose, but I finally picked it up last week and discovered that its hype had been well earned.
The story follows over a dozen characters, mostly young unmarried women who work in studios (not factories!) using a paint made with the incredible new element radium to make objects glow in the dark. As the US enters World War I, they paint watch dials, then flight instruments. It paid shockingly well—some of the women working in these studios made more each week than their fathers. When the wartime economy wound down, they began painting all manner of objects.
Radium was initially marketed as the perfect element, a panacea that can do everything from shrink tumors to clear complexions. It was considered healthful but was prohibitively expensive; the super-wealthy drank water out of radium-lined jars as a tonic. Castoffs from radium mines were added to children’s sandboxes because it looked like beach sand and was considered antibiotic. The girls who worked in the studios were glamorous and envied—the dust from the radium covered their hair and clothes, and in the dark they looked like angels floating by. But just as the war wound down, the boys returned home, and the Roaring Twenties were in full tilt, a new horrifying spectre rose.
The girls who had worked in the studios began to get sick. Their illnesses seemed impossible to diagnose, let alone treat, and many lost all their savings from the lucrative job just trying to figure out why their teeth were falling out and all their joints ached. They became anemic and weak, suffered bone necrosis, cancer, and eventually death.
Kate Moore has such a way with words, my god. This book is, straight up, a horror story. It is scarier than almost everything else I’ve ever read or watched, and much of that is because of Moore’s incredible descriptive elements. She sets up foreshadowing so well—the first few chapters of The Radium Girls are about how hopeful the young women who worked in these studios were. This was their chance at independence and wealth before or even without marriage! They could take care of their families, buy themselves nice things, save for their marriage chests, whatever. I loved these girls and their spirit. When they began to get sick, I felt horrified, betrayed, heartbroken.
What I felt reading this can only be a fraction of what their families felt.
Moore brilliantly takes us through the early investigations into their illnesses and the corporate betrayals as the companies refused to take responsibility for not having cautioned the workers that radium was dangerous. She points out that lab workers had physical protections like lead aprons, but that the girls were not only told to wear their normal clothes to work, but were explicitly told to ‘lip point’, a practice where they put the thin brushes covered in radium into their mouths to keep the brush pointed. The bristles needed to be thin for such minuscule detail work as painting watch numbers.
The result can only be classified as true body horror or medical horror. The slow agony of their jaw bones turning to powder due to necrosis, their anemia draining them of energy, their femurs spontaneously snapping in two… Moore doesn’t shy away from the sickening details. This is not to be read with food, I’ll say that, and maybe not before bed if you’re sensitive to body horror and nightmares.
What hangs over it all is an anecdote from Moore’s prologue, before page 1, when a scientist in 1901 gets burned by radium he carries in his pocket. The knowledge that radium could harm healthy living skin had been there all along. They had always known.
As the companies try to cover it up, the women and their families fight back. The results are important—protections for workers, legislation, and thousands of lives saved. They contributed to research around radiation poisoning, nuclear energy, and more. Moore’s coverage of the story is amazing, and if you haven’t read The Radium Girls yet, it’s so worth it. But get ready—it’s terrifying.
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