The Radium Girls by Kate Moore

The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women by Kate Moore is an exhaustive look at the factory women who hand-painted watch dials using radium in the 1920s and 1930s.

When I was reading this, I was frequently reminded  of Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle, which was an expose of sort on the dangerous and disgusting conditions in the meatpacking industry in Chicago. The big companies that used radium in watch dials knew radium was dangerous, just as the meat companies knew that people were being horrifically injured in stockyards. Just as the corporate owners of meatpacking plants covered up the danger, the executives at Radium Dial also tried to hide the impact of its practices. They blamed the workers, fabricated data, and managed to get away with literal murder for decades.

I have a bit of a dental issue and this book took me weeks to get through because there were so many passages like this:

...the worse her teeth were, and the ulcers, and her gums. Sometimes Knef didn't even have to pull her teeth anymore; they fell out on their own.  (Loc 620)

When her dentist pulled the teeth, a piece of decayed jawbone came out too. (Loc 1090)

...another piece of her jawbone had come out into her mouth. Not knowing what to do with it, she had put it in a small paper pillbox. (Loc 5008)

The word "teeth" appears 51 times in this book!

Basically, the women were told that radium was safe because there was a belief that radium was a cure-all and it wasn't dangerous:

When scientists had discovered, at the turn of the century, that radium could destroy human tissue, it was quickly put to use to battle cancerous tumors, with remarkable results. Consequently - as a lifesaving and thus, it was assumed, health-giving element - other uses had sprung up around it....radium had been a magnificent cure-all, treating not just cancers, but hay fever, constipation...anything you could think of. Pharmacists sold radioactive dressings and pills; there were also radium clinics and spas for those who could afford them. (Loc 180, Chapter 1)

The workers in these factories were to put a small paintbrush to their lips, dip it in the radium, and paint the dials. "It was a 'lip, dip, paint routine.'" (Loc 302) So when these women first started having health problems, it was frequently of the oral variety. Of course, it also turned out that other bones were effected and lots of other illnesses presented as side effects of radium poisoning. The company denied they were responsible and it ended up in court battle after court battle. 

I have some quibbles with the book. The author kept calling them "girls" throughout the book and while some of them were quite young when they were working at the factory, I thought the word choice diminished that these were frequently women with husbands and children and important lives to lead. I think maybe the word "girls" was used to keep reminding us that many were young and naive when they first started working, but I ended up thinking it was just dismissive. I also have some peeves with how the "girls" were described - each one seemed adorable and cute - as if the fact that they were beautiful somehow made their illnesses worse.  But I am obviously being picky here.

This was a challenging read for me, but if you're interested in worker's rights or working conditions or how women have been important in the history of labor, this might interest you. If, however, you will be utterly repulsed by graphic descriptions of horrific medical conditions, this might not be for you. 

4/5 stars

Lines of note (I read this on a Kindle and it doesn't have corresponding page number, so I just included the Kindle location):

The residue from radium extraction looked like seaside sand, and the company had offloaded this industrial waste by selling it to schools and playgrounds to use in their children's sandboxes. (Loc 564, Chapter 4)

And later on a bunch of sites that used this industrial waste became Superfund sites. The legacy of this was far-reaching.

Dropsy (Loc 929, Chapter 8) - Also known as edema, is a build-up of fluid in the body's tissues.

The radium clinics researching such effects thought that the radium stimulated the bone marrow to produce extra red blood cells, which was a good thing for the body. In a way, they were right - that was exactly what happened. Ironically, the radium did, at first, boost the health of those it had infiltrated; there were more red blood cells, something that gave an illusion of excellent health. But it was an illusion only. That stimulation of the bone marrow, by which the red blood cells were produced, soon became overstimulated. (Loc 1925, Chapter 17)

This is one of the reasons that some cancer patients actually feel pretty good after radiation treatment, I guess.

Sarah's own life may have been cut short, but the radium inside her hard a half-life of 1,600 years. It would be shooting out its rays from Sarah's bones for centuries, long after she was gone. (Loc 2144, Chapter 19)

What a terrible legacy.

"Radium eats the bone," an interview with Grace later said, "as steadily and surely as fire burns wood."(Loc 2719, Chapter 24)

So sad.

Curetted (Loc 3173, Chapter 28) - Clean or scrape with a curette, which is a surgical instrument.

...USRC wheeled out Dr. Flinn, who pronounced that his tests showed "there is not radium" in the women; he was convinced, he said, that their health problems were caused by nerves. This was a common response to women's occupational illnesses, which were often first attributed to female hysteria. (Loc 3478, Chapter 30)

I can't believe I had to wait until chapter 30 to read about how this got blamed on women's hysteria. I mean, their teeth and parts of their jaw were falling out, but it's obviously just women's nerves, right?

"They say you do not know a person," she wrote assertively, "until you have lived with them. I have lived with radium ten years now and I think I ought to know a little bit about it. So far as [the suggested] treatment, I think it's all bosh." (Loc 4171, Chapter 37)

Thinking of radium poisoning as a person led my brain down a number of (dark) avenues.

The executives of the Radium Dial Company had confirmed knowledge of radium poisoning since at least 1925, less than three years after their first studio opened in Ottawa. That was the year Marguerite Carlough first filed suit in New Jersey and...they knew radium was dangerous. When their employees had found out about the New Jersey case in 1928, the company had lied. There was a full-page advertisement in the paper: the girls are safe, their medical exams prove it; the paint is safe, for it is "pure radium only." (Loc 4395, Chapter 41)

Corporate greed is nothing new.

In 1930, she underwent an abdominal operation to remove a tumor; afterwards, her head swelled to twice its normal size - and it did not go down. "There were big black knots behind her ears," recalled her husband. A specialist was summoned. He cut Pearl's ears inside and out "for drainage"; the cuts had to be opened up every few days. (Loc 4661, Chapter 44)

Egads. 

"Even now," she said numbly, "my body gives off a faint luminous glow when surrounded by darkness."
"You could see every bone in her body," remembered her nephew James. "She was just lying on the bed."(Loc 5080, Chapter 49)

I just thought this was such a vivid descriptions.

"People are afraid to talk to me now," Catherine confessed. "Sometimes it makes me terribly lonesome - they act as though I'm already a corpse. It's hard to have people around and still be alone." (Loc 5086, Chapter 49)

Dying is not for the faint-hearted.

For the women, somewhat to their surprise, had become poster girls for workers' rights. Already, they had effected a significant change in the law that protected thousands of vulnerable employees and removed a loophole by which corporations could shirk their responsibilities. (Loc 5488, Chapter 53)

I wonder a lot what would have happened with respect to labor relations without this case or the fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory. It's terrible that so many (and children) had to suffer, but at least their lives led to reform. 

The dial-painters' case ultimately led to the establishment of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which now works nationally in the United States to ensure safe working conditions. (Loc 6144, Epilogue)

I will stop complaining about OSHA after reading this book. (Although I vowed to stop complaining abut laundry after reading How to Be a Victorian and that hasn't really happened, so don't hold me to this.)

That was the tragedy. Radium had been known to be harmful since 1901. Every death since was unnecessary. (Loc 6176, Epilogue)

Again, I stress, corporate malfeasance has always been around.