Review of Kate Moore’s ‘The Radium Girls’
Account of watch-dial painters’ suffering, deaths from radium poisoning fills a gap in history
On the dust cover of Kate Moore’s book “The Radium Girls” the photograph at the top and the wristwatch face at the center shimmer in bright green.
And the book’s subtitle, “The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women,” is ironic.
The irony is in the word “shining.” “The Radium Girls” is a true and tragic story about young American working women who were unknowingly poisoned by radioactive radium they were exposed to as watch-dial painters. They didn’t realize how poisonous — indeed, how fatal — the radium dust they painted on the dials was.
The story goes back to 1917 and the watch-dial factories in New Jersey and to a watch-dial factory in rural Illinois in 1922. (Radium as a radioactive chemical element had been discovered by Marie and Pierre Curie in 1898.)
The book describes the pain and suffering many of these women faced, the help they got from Dr. Harrison Martland, who identified radium as poisonous, and the legal assistance they received from the Consumers League. The league was key to getting laws amended to protect future workers.
Dr. Martland, Moore said in an email, “was vocal in his attempts to close down the dangerous radium industry. So other people were speaking out, but the (women’s) court cases brought a publicity that was otherwise absent and brought public pressure to bear on the radium firms, a pressure that was more powerful than lone voices.”
Moore believes, however, that the factories were determined to silence the watch-dial workers in their effort to publicize the dangers of their jobs. “The powerful voice was that of the radium firms, many of whom remained powerful even after the scandal. Of course, the girls themselves died: There is no greater silencer,” Moore said.
She said she thinks the watch-dial companies “were determined to protect their profits, and their industry, at any cost.”
Moore, who is British, decided to write the book after directing Melanie Marnich’s play “These Shining Lives,” about four of the female dial painters.
“My auditions (for the play) were in January 2015, and over Christmas 2014 I was doing research to make the production as authentic as possible,” Moore wrote in the email. “That’s when I was reading the existing books about what happened to the radium girls, and thinking, ‘Why is there no book that focuses on the individual women and tells the story from their perspective?’”
She pitched a book proposal to publishers even before the stage production was mounted.
Moore has written two books that have been best-sellers in England. One is “The Lovers’ Book,” repackaged as “Roses Are Red,” a romance guide. The other is “Felix the Railway Cat,” a true story of a cat that lives in Huddersfield Station in Yorkshire.