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 […]