![]() While we live at a particular intersection of economic struggle and increasing social awareness of the oppression and suppression of vulnerable people-i.e. The reality of life is that you cannot trust a corporation that exists solely to make money-as all corporations are. It takes an emotional toll-but it’s worth it, and it’s important to pay respects to these largely unsung heroes who have, through their absolute suffering and misfortune, prevented the mutilation of countless more. Through this, you grow close enough to these women that you feel it when they die. However, Moore’s attention to detail is at times admirable, even where it is clearly manufactured for the sake of connecting to the reader’s humanity and empathy. Moore’s prose fluctuates in quality from elegant to perhaps tacky or a bit over-the-top, and there are points where she focuses too heavily on on particular detail-Grace’s death, for example, receives far too much page time-to the detriment of other details-Grace’s death eclipsed any details about the other 4 women involved in that first court case. Moore offers readers a real, genuine and personal view into the intimate, personal lives of victims. So why would governing bodies want to kill the industry? It relies on radium, too. So the radium companies kept making money. Readers need to understand that every reference in this book is real, and this was real suffering that women endured under the boot of capitalism. ![]() I scraped by without tears up until then, but not for lack of emotion. I don’t think I’m made of strong enough stuff to have survived what those women braved every single day, just to participate in their own lives. I needed 3 simultaneously in March 2018, and I legit wanted to die. If you have ever needed a root canal, you understand a sliver of a shadow of the end months, years, of these women’s lives. It does not justify their unnecessary deaths. It does not lessen the absolutely deplorable disinterest of the radium companies to their former employees. But that in no way lessens the tragedy their families were forced to suffer. Ultimately, these poor women benefited society in a way that has saved more lives than were lost in the battle in the 70ish years that have passed. The EPA was established in large part because of these women, and the radiation in these factory sites is still in the process of being cleaned up. And yet it was not until nearly 1940 that the country and affected women saw change. By 1906, it was established that radium could have disastrous effects on the human body. Those in power knew early on that radium was dangerous. In Ottowa, the community at large got so mad about the lawsuits that the girls were ostracized by their neighbors and nearly chased out of their church.Ĭountless women died miserable deaths after being plagued by mysterious misery in life. When the country is ravaged by the Great Depression, one doesn’t simply kill off the only company making money in the entire community. But when things started to go wrong, nobody wanted to look closer. They were the pride of their communities. These radium-producing companies generated a lot of income. The reality is that no one in authority wanted to do anything about radium complaints because of money-and “jurisdiction”, and shitty, ineffective laws. Girls worked for a few years and then moved on to build families or take other jobs, and everything was swell. Hundreds of girls joined the ranks to paint for persuasively high wages, and those wages are what kept girls working for long periods of time.Įveryone was extremely optimistic. ![]() But a significant volume of radium was used to paint watch dials and military equipment for the war effort. They laced cosmetics and supplements with it. Radium was lauded as the most wonderful discovery in then-modern science. ![]() The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women by Kate Moore is a nonfiction book about the young women who worked as dial painters, not only handling the highly radioactive substance radium, but ingesting, and even playing with it. ![]()
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