Chapter One Hundred Ninety-Six: Radium Girls

Kate Moore's non-fiction book Radium Girls makes for powerful listening--it was often difficult to bear because the subject matter was so affecting, even as I desperately wanted to find out the ultimate fate of the women at the center of this narrative.  The radium girls were teenagers and young women hired to paint watch dials with luminous, radium-based paint in the years following WWI.  They were taught to point their paintbrushes frequently using their lips, in order to paint the numbers as neatly and quickly as possible.  At first, it was the ideal job--it offered well-paid and well-regarded work in the company of dozens of other young women--but after a few years, several of the dial painters began to fall ill with strange, horrible, and--at first--unexplainable symptoms.  I don't want to give away much more, but this is basically an account of extreme corporate greed and baldfaced deceit, with a hefty dose of acute human suffering as the result.  At turns legal drama, medical thriller, and family saga, this book is not for the squeamish or faint of heart, but it tells a really important story of two groups of women in two different radium plants who persisted in their pursuit of justice for themselves and for future generations of industrial workers.