The history of business is a history of violence. Radium killed these young women, but Moore leaves no room for misunderstanding: The companies murdered them.
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The fact that the radium girls faced the same battles as their Victorian predecessors is less surprising when you consider how many of those battles are still happening: Adequate health care, adequate compensation, and - crucially - effective worker protections through a legal system designed to favor corporations. And Radium Girls spares us nothing of their suffering though at times the foreshadowing reads more like a true-crime story, Moore is intent on making the reader viscerally understand the pain in which these young women were living, and through which they had to fight in order to get their problems recognized.Īnd honestly, the true-crime parallels might be warranted. The book, infuriating for necessary reasons, traces the women at two dial-making factories - the USRC in New Jersey, and Radiant Dial in Illinois. And the horror at the heart of Kate Moore's Radium Girls lies in the way doctors, the company, and the law failed these women as they sought justice for the lives they were losing.Īuthor Interviews Dark Lives Of 'The Radium Girls' Left A Bright Legacy For Workers, Science Maggia was the first of the girls at USRC to die in agony from radium poisoning, but far from the last. She painted glowing numbers on dials with their radium paint, licking her paintbrush for accuracy as she'd been taught, and it killed her. Later strikers invoked the match girls as inspiration girls who'd come together so something so dangerous couldn't happen again.īut no one told Mollie Maggia about the match girls before she went to the United States Radium Corporation in New Jersey, just after World War I. Against expectations, they won - a watershed for Victorian industrial workers. A girl with "phossy jaw" would literally glow in the dark as her jawbone slowly disintegrated. Their reason was a particularly horrifying working condition: ingesting phosphorus. In 1888, the match girls of London went on strike. Your purchase helps support NPR programming.