Book review: The Radium Girls

The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women by Kate Moore is an unrelenting and horrifying story of industrial wrongdoing. This book, a historical account of workers injured due to an unchecked occupational hazard, is foremost a warning that people, even physicians who take an oath to do no harm, are capable of the cruelest denial to benefit themselves financially and to protect the interests of business.

The author Kate Moore features the stories of an almost overwhelming number (more than 30) of affected young women from New Jersey and Illinois (the sites of the radium paint companies). These young women are introduced in their youthful glory, when all are transitioning to adulthood, supporting their families of origin or beginning relationships and starting their own families. At work, these girls had dipped their brushes in the radium-tinged paint and twirled the end between their lips to produce the most delicate of points for illustrating the illuminating, glow-in-the-dark dials of watches and instrument panels of warplanes. They were well-compensated, especially for speed and accuracy in dial painting.

The dial painters often glowed-in-the-dark like ghosts. A haunting and portent image of what would soon befall them, but one that some of the girls found delight in by playing with the dust, even applying it to their skin to stand out during a night of dancing. The glow came from the invisible clouds of radium dust in the factories that settled on surfaces such as hair, skin, and clothing and were brought home by the workers.

It is a difficult read, but I think a necessary one. The radium girls were so very young and often from poor immigrant families. These young women suffered horrifying physical consequences due to their unknowing and repeated exposures to radiation in the radium paint. The following passage from the book describes one of the many devastating afflictions that affected these young women:

She hobbled over to Dr. Knef’s dental chair and then leaned back. Gingerly she opened her mouth for him. He bent over her and prepared to probe inside. There were barely any teeth left now, he saw; red-raw ulcers peppered the inside of her mouth instead. Mollie tried to indicate that her jaw was hurting especially, and Knef prodded delicately at the bone in her mouth. To his horror and shock, even though his touch had been gentle, her jawbone broke against his fingers. He then removed it, “not by an operation, but merely by putting his fingers in her mouth and lifting it out.” A week or so later, her entire lower jaw was removed in the same way.

The entire scope of the legal actions against two companies, which began in 1925, is covered in the book. The attempts of a string of lawyers and government champions to provide compensation to the young women and their families, in most cases to simply cover their significant medical and dental treatment costs, were repeated again and again (even Clarence Darrow, the famous litigator of the Scopes monkey trial, makes an appearance). It serves as a fascinating account of the enormous difficulty in taking on a legal course of action against entities of the powerful, and one in which a long view is required. A real triumph with acknowledgment of radium poisoning as the cause of their morbidity and mortality finally occurred in 1939.

This ruling doubtlessly saved many lives, as World War II increased the demand for radium and plutonium. Safety measures to protect the wartime radium dial-painters and Manhattan project workers directly resulted from the radiation poisoning evidence presented in the case against the radium paint companies.

In Europe, a different technique, using glass rods, was employed to paint illuminated watch and instrument dials. Thus, a similar fate did not befall the European dial painters. The glass rod method was a slower one to execute, and therefore, it was dismissed as an option by the U.S. manufacturers.

Recommended reading

The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women by Kate Moore