Kate Moore’s The Radium Girls is, at first glance, a long-overdue study of the early twentieth century female factory workers who were hired to paint watch dials and hands with radium paint. Moore focuses on the workers at two plants, one in Newark, New Jersey, and one in Ottawa, Illinois. The women were encouraged, in fact required to “lip point,” to put the uranium-coated paintbrushes in their mouths to wet them and create the necessary fine point for the watches. Bosses never told them that radium could be not just toxic but deadly. And when the women start to feel the physical impact of their work and seek recourse, the companies try to stymie them at every turn.
The story is gruesome and tragic. Moore details disease and disintegration: the women experience debilitating pain in various parts of their bodies, ultimately resulting in amputation and death; teeth fall out, leaving seeping pus-filled sores that never heal; some lose their jawbones, literally opening their mouths and pulling out their mandibles; cancerous sarcomas balloon on throats, legs, and elbows. Nearly every woman dies in intense pain in her 20s or 30s.
Moore clearly loves the subjects of her story. She narrates personal details of several of the women. However, at times this abundance of details gets confusing; I constantly had to refer to the lists of the women at the beginning to remember whom I was reading about. While it’s important that their stories are told, because there are so many women described in detail, it makes the book quite long–in my opinion longer than necessary. Moreover, Moore chooses to focus quite a bit on the women’s physical appearances. I lost count how many women were described as attractive, lovely, beautiful, or good-looking.
Much of The Radium Girls is concerned with the corporations’ consistent refusal to admit culpability and to pay for the workers’ mounting medical bills; however, Moore does not situate corporatist attitudes within the political era that the radium girls worked. We’re talking Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover–all presiding over a United States that had little regard for workers, let alone female workers, and who endorsed a laissez-faire approach to business. It would have been nice if Moore acknowledged that the resistance faced by the radium worker was not just from the radium corporations but also from the prevailing attitudes of the time.
The most glaring blind spot in the book, however, is Moore’s failure to make explicit just how the radium workers were failed by the medical establishment of the 1920s and 1930s. They were, nearly uniformly, dismissed, misdiagnosed, overcharged, and lied to by (male, of course) doctors, who were often covertly working for the radium corporations. I don’t know–I think that highlighting this travesty would resonate with a few present-day readers, who may have had their own belittling experiences with medical professionals.
I learned a lot from reading this book–I do hope that someday we have a more developed history of what the radium girls endured. Their story remains all too relevant.