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Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} the Radium Girls the Dark Story of America's Shining Women by Kate Moore Their Final Fight Was for Justice Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} The Radium Girls The Dark Story of America's Shining Women by Kate Moore Their final fight was for justice. "In this thrilling and carefully crafted book, Moore tells the shocking story of how early 20th-century corporate and legal America set about silencing dozens of working-class women who had been systematically poisoned by radiation . Moore [writes] so lyrically . FIVE STARS" - Mail on Sunday. ". a must-read for anyone interested in American and women's history" - STARRED review, Library Journal. To this website, which celebrates the Radium Girls: the American women from the Roaring Twenties who were poisoned by their work and courageously fought for justice, and who inspired the multi-award-winning and New York Times bestselling book The Radium Girls by Kate Moore. This website is intended as a companion site to Moore’s book. Here you can read more about the women, listen to interviews with the author, read reviews and find answers to some frequently asked questions. Enjoy browsing the site. Thank you for visiting, but most of all for taking time to remember the Radium Girls. Cookie Consent and Choices. NPR’s sites use cookies, similar tracking and storage technologies, and information about the device you use to access our sites (together, “cookies”) to enhance your viewing, listening and user experience, personalize content, personalize messages from NPR’s sponsors, provide social media features, and analyze NPR’s traffic. This information is shared with social media, sponsorship, analytics, and other vendors or service providers. See details. You may click on “ Your Choices ” below to learn about and use cookie management tools to limit use of cookies when you visit NPR’s sites. You can adjust your cookie choices in those tools at any time. If you click “ Agree and Continue ” below, you acknowledge that your cookie choices in those tools will be respected and that you otherwise agree to the use of cookies on NPR’s sites. The Messed Up Truth About The Radium Girls. History is filled with episodes that prove mankind is just sort of making everything up as it goes. There's no shortage of things that can kill us or do horrible, terrible things to our soft and squishy bodies, and every time we think we know about them all, it turns out there's something else lurking around the corner. And sometimes, it's disguised as something awesome. Need proof? Look no further than the Radium Girls. Yes, that radium. Today, the Royal Society of Chemistry says there's really only one use for radium — targeted cancer treatments, because it's so good at killing cells. It was first discovered in 1898 by Marie and Pierre Curie, after they extracted a single milligram from ten tons of a uranium ore called pitchblende. And it was pretty darn cool. It glowed, and seriously, how exciting is that? Unfortunately, it was also deadly — as the so- called Radium Girls would find out. It was a great job. before the Radium Girls began to disintegrate. It didn't take long for entrepreneurs to see the potential value in the luminescent properties of radium. Just a few years after it was discovered, William J. Hammer mixed it with zinc sulfide and created a paint. While he didn't patent the invention, Tiffany & Company did. According to the Oak Ridge Associated Universities, it was wildly popular in Europe first, and the people who worked with it would glow as they walked through the streets at night. It wasn't until 1914 that radium-based luminescent paint started to be produced in the US. By 1921, the main manufacturer had already expanded a few times and moved, changing their name to the United States Radium Corporation and patenting the name "Undark" for their paint. Other companies started popping up as well, using named like "Luna" and "Marvelite" for their paints. They weren't just making paints, they were doing the painting, too. According to NPR, US Radium hired scores of girls and young women — as young as just 11-years-old — to paint watch dials with the glow-in-the-dark, radium-based paint. As if just working with the paint wasn't bad enough, they were also encouraged to put the brush between their lips and twirl it into a point. It was the best way to get truly precise numbers and brush strokes, but with each lick of the brush, they were swallowing radium. Many girls loved to paint themselves with radium. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there were no safety precautions put in place for working with this material that we now know is deadly. According to the Atomic Heritage Foundation, it wasn't long before US Radium was even getting military contracts to paint watches and instrument panels, and that meant more work for the girls. That should have been a good thing, but it absolutely wasn't. The workers, of course, didn't know this — they were assured the paint was harmless, so they often just had a little fun with it, too. The Atlantic says it was common for the girls to paint their fingernails and teeth with it, because who wouldn't love to glow in the dark? Later — much later — when Harvard physiologist Cecil Drinker did a study to see just how much radium the girls were actually covered in, he found something terrible. Workers would be so covered with the paint and radium dust used elsewhere in the plant that they would glow completely. The dust got everywhere: it wasn't just on their hands and faces, it was on their clothes, their undergarments, and even on their skin beneath their clothes. And all along, they were assured it was safe. Have you had your daily dose of radium? It's worth noting that this wasn't just a case of a corrupt company telling their employees their working conditions were safe — at least, not at first. Radium was thought to be super healthy: it was often marketed as a cure-all, and there was a shocking number of products that hit the market just full of radium. And, you know, death. It really started in earnest in 1904, when LD Gardner began marketing a health water he called "Liquid Sunshine." According to the New York Historical Society, belief in radium's healthy benefits was rooted in a massive misstep in logic. Early experiments using radium to kill cancer cells had been a success, and if it could kill cancer, surely, it could kill whatever else was ailing you . right? Real doctors started experimenting with it as a cure for things like tuberculosis and lupus, while the quacks started marketing their own so-called cures for everything from acne and baldness to impotence and insanity. People drank radium water and brushed their teeth with radium toothpaste, and radium cosmetics were all the rage. Children played with toys painted with radium, and performers on the New York stage danced and twirled in costumes that glowed. Radium was in such high demand that prices soared. By 1915, a single gram cost what would be around $1.9 million in today's money, and that means many of the products didn't contain real radium — fortunately for consumers. The Radium Girls' sickness came slowly. When the workers started getting sick, they got sick very slowly. Today, we know exactly what was happening to them. Calcium, says the National Institute of Child Health and Development, works like this: bones constantly strengthen themselves by replacing old calcium with new calcium. When there's an imbalance of more calcium going out than coming in, that's when bones get weak and start breaking. But according to the Atomic Heritage Foundation, the human body isn't great at telling the difference between radium and calcium. Radium gets absorbed into the bones just like calcium does, and when that happens, the rot starts. Writer and historian Kate Moore documented the cases of the Radium Girls (via The Spectator) and found that there were a whole host of symptoms. Some started suffering from chronic exhaustion. For many, it started with their teeth — one by one, those teeth would start to decay and rot. When they were removed, their gums wouldn't heal. In some cases, the jaw would just simply disintegrate at the dentist's touch. Bad breath was common. Skin became so delicate that the slightest touch would tear open wounds. Ulcers formed for some, and those that were pregnant bore stillborn babies. It was a variety of symptoms, and when the girls started looking for recompense, that became a huge problem. Attorneys for US Radium argued that with all of these different ailments, they couldn't possibly have the same underlying cause. But. they did. When it got bad, it got really bad for the Radium Girls. According to author and historian Kate Moore (via NPR), there's no way to tell just how many dial painters there were, and how many died terrible, painful deaths. After the symptoms came the deaths, and they were always awful and usually long, drawn-out illnesses punctuated by doctor's visits where they were assured the pain in their bones was something like arthritis. Many — those that we know about, at least — were typically in their 20s when they became really and truly ill. They were young women like Margaret Looney, who grew so weak her fiance would pull her around in a wagon. Bones crumbled, limbs were amputated, spines were crushed under their own weight. The girls became anemic, bedridden, unable to eat. Wisconsin PRX reports that their bones were so weakened their internal structure resembled a honeycomb.
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