The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women by Kate Moore is an incredible non-fiction book by Kate Moore. This book won the Best Historical & Biography 2017 on Goodreads, and for good reason! Moore tells the stories of The Radium Girls, a group of young women who were dial painters during World War 1 and suffered excruciating and devastating effects from ingesting radium while working. The narration follows the courageous young women from when they are happy-go-lucky teenagers, happy to have scored a high paying job dial painting. At the time, Radium was a new discovery and everyone believed that Radium was good for you, so no precautions were taken to protect workers against the Radium. However, even as some of the women started having strange health consequences, they were still told that Radium was not harmful and the reasons they were all getting sick was not from their work. They were being lied to.
The rest of the book follows these courageous as they undergo painful, debilitating Radium side effects with no cure. Their jaws disintegrate, they grow sarcomas, they get weak, they are riddled with pain, their bones are becoming more and more brittle and yet no one believes them. They begin landmark cases in suing the Radium Dial companies that once employed them and are still saying they are innocent. We see all of the young women joining together in both New Jersey and Ottawa, Illinois as they suffer through fellow friends dying and sue their former employers to finally get justice and some money to help pay their massive medical bills.
What The Radium Girls did during this time period of the 1920s-1930s was unheard of at the time, and was monumental for women's and worker's rights. These women are not celebrated enough today and this amazing book helps feature these incredible women who suffered insurmountably.
