The Radium Girls by Kate Moore (Non-Fiction)

In February 1917, 14-year-old Katherine Schaub began work as a painter in a watch factory owned by the Radium Luminous Materials Corporation in Newark, New Jersey. She joined dozens of other young women whose job was to make the tiny numbers on watch dials glow in the dark by applying radium paint.

Five and a half years later in Ottawa, Illinois, 19-year-old Catherine Wolfe was one of another group of young women who began similar work for the Radium Dial Company. In both locations, the girls were taught to sharpen the points on their paint brushes by rolling them between their lips – after they had been dipped in the radioactive paint. There were no safety protocols in place; their employers’ only concern was that the expensive radium not be wasted and production goals be met. 

At the end of each workday, the women of child-bearing age and younger were so covered in radium powder that – just like the watch numerals they painted – their clothes, hair and bodies glowed. While their employers insisted there was no danger in handling the minute quantity of radium in the paint, they became horribly ill and severely crippled.  Not until the late 1930’s, after many of them had died, did any of them win a court case. Radium decays so slowly that when bodies were exhumed decades later for research, they were still a thousand times more radioactive than is considered safe. Understanding and acknowledgement of this tragedy was slow in emerging from behind closed corporate doors,  but ultimately contributed to the cessation of atmospheric nuclear testing and the development of worker safety regulations.

The author skillfully humanizes the story, not only telling us the women’s names but showing us their lives. We get to know their backgrounds, their families, and their dreams, and the toll taken not only on their physical bodies but also on their and their loved ones’ psyches – not to mention the financial impact during the Great Depression of high medical bills and inability to work.  It’s a sad and infuriating story, and a testament to the author’s skill that she keeps the reader engaged even when the litany of women and their ailments gets a bit tedious and repetitive. I read the whole 400-page book in two sessions last night and today.

One question that isn’t answered – perhaps because the answer doesn’t exist – is the extent to which the children of these women were affected in utero by their mothers’ exposures. We learn about a handful of miscarriages and stillbirths, at least one case of infertility and a small number of offspring who were sickly and who died young. We are not told if these are statistically significant compared to the general population at the time or whether there was any investigation to determine a potential link to the radium paint. Perhaps this was not a goal of the author or the information isn’t available, but it is a question I pondered every time I read about a marriage or birth.

An interesting book club question would focus on how long it took to connect the dots on these cases in the pre-Internet age. The court cases eventually drew reporters from around the country, but before that doctors were sometimes unaware of similar cases in the same town, much less hundreds of miles away. Would that happen today?

I recommend this as a historically important and highly readable work of non-fiction.