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The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women 2016
The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women is a 2016 nonfiction work by English author Kate Moore that tells the story of the American watch dial painting industry and the women who worked in it. These women, known as the Radium Girls, used luminous paint containing radium-226 to create radioluminescent watch faces. The book was published in 2016.
Moore became interested in writing this book after directing a play titled These Shining Lives by Melanie Marnich. This play focuses on young female factory workers in Ottawa, Illinois, who were exposed to radium during the 1920s when painting watch dials. Moore noticed that many of these women’s individual stories were missing from historical records.
The book follows the time period from 1917 through the 1940s, focusing on three American studios where the women worked. It describes how the real-life dial painters had to shape their brushes by mouth due to the radium-laden paint, and how no health or safety measures were in place. The structure of the book is divided into three parts: "Knowledge," "Power," and "Justice." It also contains a prologue, an epilogue, a postscript, and a bibliography.
Reviews of the book appeared in outlets such as The Atlantic, Booklist, Bustle, Journal of the Mississippi State Medical Association, The San Francisco Book Review, The Spectator, and The Times, as well as NPR. Academic institutions including the Glasgow Women's Library, Royal Society of Chemistry, and the University of Waterloo also reviewed it.
In 2017, readers of Goodreads voted this book the best History & Biography title at the Goodreads Choice Awards.
Details
- Publisher
- Sourcebooks
- ISBN
- 9781492650959
- Pages
- 480
