The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women (Questions)

1. The Radium Girls is filled with both triumph and tragedy. Which part of the story affected you the most, and why? 2. Is there a figure in The Radium Girls that resonates more strongly with you than others? If so, what part of their story or character stood out? 3. Even after radium was proved poisonous, and the illness verified as work-related, the radium companies stood fast by their convictions. Why do you believe they were so resilient, and can you imagine modern companies behaving with such similar ruthlessness? 4. How do you believe the radium companies, and the press, would have reacted differently to the scandal had the workers been male? Considering the time period, how did their gender help and hinder their case? 5. How do you think today's world would be different had The Radium Girls not fought back against the radium companies? 6. It takes over 1,500 years for the effects of radium to wear off. This means that the bodies of the women and parts of the towns in which they worked remain poisonous to this day. Despite the harrowing implications, why do you feel this story hasn't been widely explored? 7. The Radium Girls is told mostly through the eyes of the radium-dial workers, their families, and friends; however, previous research never focused on their personal journeys. How did it change your appreciation of or engagement with the story to know the smaller, personal details of the girls' lives? Is there another historical event where you've noticed women being pushed to the sidelines? 8. Although radium can be seen as an evil entity in the book, it's also been used for the greater good. Explore how radium has changed the world in a positive way. Do you feel it was worth the sacrifice?

9. Besides radium, what other world-altering discoveries can you think of that both led to advancement, and also tragedy? 10. How were you inspired by the strength of the "shining girls", and how can you carry that onwards to incite change in your own life?

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The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women

(About the Author)

Kate Moore was born in Northampton, England and grew up in Peterborough. She studied English Literature at the University of Warwick. A Sunday Times ​ bestselling author, she writes across various genres, from biography and history ​ ​ to gift and humour, and is also in demand as a book editor and ghostwriter. ​ ​ ​ ​ Before becoming a full-time author and freelance editor, she was an editorial director at Penguin UK. Kate Moore is also an actress. Moore first discovered the story of the radium girls when she directed the play These Shining Lives by Melanie Marnich, which dramatises the experiences of the ​ Ottawa dial-painters; this production played in two theatres in London in 2015, including a transfer to the Pleasance, and won critical acclaim. While conducting ​ ​ research for the play, she realised there was no book that focused on the women and told their story in their own words. Feeling passionately that the women deserved such a book, she decided to write it. Moore’s research took her all over America – to Newark and Orange, New Jersey; to New York and Washington, DC; and to and Ottawa, Illinois. She walked in the women’s footsteps and met their families; visited their homes and graves; stood in the lobby of Grossman’s office and at the sites of the dial-painting studios, and remembered the radium girls. She hopes, through her book, that you will do the same. Kate Moore lives in London, England with her husband.

http://theradiumgirls.com/author/4593781072

The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women (Reviews)

Carefully researched, the work will stun readers with its descriptions of the glittering artisans who, oblivious to health dangers, twirled camel-hair brushes to fine points using their mouths, a technique called lip-pointing...Moore details what was a 'ground-breaking, law-changing, and life-saving accomplishment' for worker's rights. Publisher Weekly Moore's well-researched narrative is written with clarity and a sympathetic voice that brings these figures and their struggles to life...a must-read for anyone interested in American and women's history, as well as topics of law, health, and industrial safety. Library Journa [A] fascinating social history - one that significantly reflects on the class and gender of those involved - [is] Catherine Cookson meets Mad Men...The importance of the brave and blighted dial-painters cannot be overstated. The Sunday Times (UK) Kate Moore's gripping narrative about the betrayal of the radium girls-gracefully told and exhaustively researched-makes this a nonfiction classic. I particularly admire Moore's compassion for her subjects and her story-telling prowess, which brings alive a shameful era in America's industrial history. Rinker Buck, author of The Oregon Trail

https://www.bookbrowse.com/reviews/index.cfm/book_number/3592/the-radium-girls#media_reviews

The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women (Enhancement)

The high demand for radium is at the heart of Kate Moore's book, The Radium Girls. Radium is a naturally occurring element, most of which is found in uranium ore; it makes up approximately 1 part per trillion of the Earth's crust, making it our planet's 84th most common component. One ton of uranium ore can contain as little as 0.14 grams of radium. We're constantly exposed to this highly toxic metal, but in very minute amounts. The element was discovered by Pierre and Marie Curie in December 1898. While working to separate uranium from a mineral called pitchblende, Marie discovered that the material remaining after the uranium was removed was actually more radioactive than the chemical they originally sought. After refining tons of pitchblende (now known as uraninite), Curie narrowed down the source of the radiation to two previously unknown elements: polonium and radium. Curie further discovered that radium – a soft, shiny, silvery metal - was about 3 million times more radioactive than uranium. Radium's dangerous nature was a concern very soon after its discovery. After the "Radium Girls" won lawsuits against their employers for exposing them to a known health risk, use of radium to create read-in-the-dark devices waned, although radioactive rays from radium are easily blocked by glass or metal, so the material is safe if precautions are taken. Nevertheless, some experiments with radium led doctors to believe the substance was not only safe but beneficial.

https://www.bookbrowse.com/reviews/index.cfm/book_number/3592/the-radium-girls#reviews

Dark Lives Of 'The Radium Girls' Left A Bright Legacy For Workers, Science Weekend Edition Saturday, 22 Apr. 2017. Gale Literature Resource Center HOST: MARY LOUISE KELLY MARY LOUISE KELLY: In the early days of the 20th century, radium factories in New Jersey and Illinois employed mostly women to paint watch faces and clock faces with luminous paint. The paint got everywhere - hair, hands, clothes. They were called the shining girls because, quite literally, they glowed, and they were dying. Kate Moore's new book is about the young women who were poisoned by the radium paint and the five of them who sued U.S. Radium in a case that led to labor safety standards and worker's rights. It's called "The Radium Girls," and Kate Moore joins us from the BBC in London. Welcome. KATE MOORE: Thank you so much. KELLY: Your book opens a century ago in 1917 - a time when I had no idea you could buy radium lingerie, radium jockstraps, radium toothpaste, pills. It was everywhere. It was considered a wonder drug, a cure-all. MOORE: It was. It's astonishing to our modern-day perception to read about it, but radium truly was an international craze. It was in everything from cosmetics to food. And it very much had an allure to it. You know, it was the rich and famous who would drink radium water and attend radium clinics and spas. KELLY: Oh, right, because it was expensive, as well. MOORE: It was really expensive. It was the most expensive substance on Earth at the time. We're talking about the equivalent of 2.2 million dollars for a single gram. KELLY: Wow. And in 1917, of course, with World War I cranking up, there was huge military demand for watches that you could see in the dark and dials that you could see in the - in the dark. MOORE: That's right. And as you said, this is when the book opens, so shortly before America joined the First World War. And once they did, of course, join that global conflict, there was this huge boom to the radium industry. Soldiers needed watches, and people needed it for the planes and the trucks and so on. And so the dial painters, who were the radium girls - they were employed to paint all these

dials with luminous radium paint. And they were taught to lip point, so to put their brushes between their lips to make a fine point for the detailed handiwork. KELLY: To actually put the brush with the radium paint into their mouth. MOORE: Yeah, that's the technique that they were taught. And they did say, you know, Mae Cubberly, who's one of the radium girls that I write about in the book - she said, the first thing we said was - does this stuff hurt you? And their managers said no. KELLY: When did the young women start getting sick? MOORE: It tended to take about five years for the initial symptoms to start to show. And that was one of the problems that the radium girls had 'cause, as you said at the start of this interview, radium at the time we're talking about was seen as this wonder drug. It was an incredibly lucrative industry. You know, all those people making the cosmetics and the clinics and so on - they were making an awful lot of money out of it. So when the radium girls started to get sick about five years after they started dial painting, the radium firms were determined that they would not link this insidious disease that was taking so long to show itself. And that was one of the problems the girls had. KELLY: And when I started getting sick, what were the symptoms? MOORE: It would start quite innocently, actually. It would start perhaps with an aching limb or a bad tooth that would first start to kind of wobble and then it would fall out, sometimes on its own. But as the sickness developed and set in with the women, it got a lot more gruesome. All of their teeth would fall out, sometimes replaced by ulcers that would then seep pus constantly. And that aching limb would actually start to spontaneously fracture. And it might not be a limb. It might be their spine. It might be their jaw bone. And what was happening was the radium had settled in their bones, and it was actually boring holes inside their bones while the women were still alive. It's horrifying. KELLY: It's actually rotting their bones from the inside. MOORE: It's rotting. Yeah. KELLY: I suppose worth noting - the - these were young women at the time that they were employed working in factories. Not …

MOORE: Teenagers, many of them. Yeah. KELLY: Teenagers - I mean, how young were some of them? MOORE: Well, the youngest - records show that the youngest were 11. KELLY: Oh, wow. MOORE: Some of the girls I wrote about were 13, 14 when they started. KELLY: And to reconstruct those stories - I mean, many of these women, of course, are no longer living as you're trying to research this book. You actually went back and saw their communities, tried to go see where they had lived and where they had worked. What was it like standing outside the site where the U.S. Radium Corporation was? MOORE: Yeah. It was something that I thought was really important because, you know, the radium girls have not been entirely forgotten. I think it rings a vague bell with people. But what I wanted to do with my book is to focus on the girls themselves, so my research did take me to their houses. It took me to the sites. It took me to meet their families so that they could tell me about them because, for me, it was always about the women who were the radium girls. You know, how did they find the courage in the face of the horrific poisoning that I've been describing? How did they find the strength to stand up for their rights? KELLY: You write that they also had implications for research in the Manhattan Project, for example - that there just was not awareness of some of the dangers that workers there faced. And some of the - some of the work that the radium girls had done helped change the way that program was run - maybe saved lives there, as well. MOORE: Yeah, absolutely. There was a direct link. Glenn Seaborg, who was the leading scientist on the Manhattan Project, literally wrote in his diary that he had a vision of the ghost girls, of the shining girls, the radium girls. And he therefore insisted that they had to do research into the materials that they were using on the Manhattan Project. It was found that they were biomedically very similar to radium, and therefore there were non-negotiable safety guidelines put in place. And after the war, the Atomic Energy Commission officials actually said the

radium girls were invaluable because if it hadn't been for them, countless thousands of other workers would have been killed. KELLY: And some of these - some of the women who survived into their later years - they submitted to medical testing all their lives. MOORE: Yeah. Again, this is another part of their extraordinary legacy. Through their willingness to allow scientists to probe their bodies, they have given us a store of knowledge about internal radiation that we simply would not have had if they weren't prepared to do that. And I think for many of the women, it was their gift for humanity that we're still benefiting from today. KELLY: The book is called "The Radium Girls: The Dark Story Of America's Shining Women." It's by Kate Moore. Kate Moore, thanks very much. MOORE: Thank you so much. Disclaimer: The link provided here is to a third-party website. Gale products link to third-party content as a convenience to users only. Gale does not endorse, approve, investigate, verify or monitor the websites, content or information contained within or accessed from third-party resources. Additionally, Gale, a Cengage company, does not control the accuracy, completeness, timeliness or appropriateness of the content or information on the linked site. If you choose to visit a third-party website you will be subject to its terms of use and privacy policies, for which Gale is not responsible. Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 National Public Radio, Inc. (NPR). All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions page at www..org for further information. NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio.

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