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

"Henrik: This is another book that is written for a general audience. Kate Moore is an English author who discovered this story when she directed a play called These Shining Lives by Melanie Marnich. That play focuses on the Ottawa, Illinois case that is described in the book. Radium Girls is about the problems that afflicted girls who worked in factories in two places in the United States—Newark and Orange, New Jersey, and Ottawa, Illinois—where they were painting watch dials using radium. Noelle: They did very technical painting with radium, which glowed, so was important for seeing in the dark—also for instrument dials in wartime. The painters, all women, would shape the brushes using their lips; it was called lip painting. That exposed the painters to radium, which was the material in the paint. Radium was used in medicines, and there was a thought among the people who worked there that it was good for you. But then they started experiencing severe poisoning. It’s a story that is echoed in a lot of pollution narratives of industrial workers being harmed by substances, and then the denial and legal battles and economic interests that pushed against the realization and action to mitigate those harms. It’s a very familiar type of story, unfortunately, which you see echoed in a lot of different cases where people were harmed and their experiences weren’t recognized by regulators, by policymakers, by the legal system. It oftentimes took decades before these issues were fully appreciated and the victims were compensated. We see this with mercury in the Minamata case as well, in Japan. Noelle: The second half of the book talks a lot about their legal battles and their struggles with the legal system, not only to get compensation but also to prevent this kind of thing from happening again. Henrik: Also, many of the girls died before they could get any compensation. The authorities were slow to act. Corporate managements, in both cases, were denying any kind of responsibility, dragging it out, appealing. They were basically trying to run down the clock, thinking that if they could keep this going in the courts and the workers died before there is any kind of legal settlement, then they would be off the hook. Noelle: The book also looks at public awareness of environmental hazards—the role of journalists and the role of people telling stories to promote greater understanding of environmental harms and in particular harms to workers in the context of industrial production."