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

"What she did feel part of, though, was radium's all-pervasive entry into American life. It was a craze, no other word for it. The element was dubbed 'liquid sunshine,' and it lit up not just the hospitals and drawing rooms of America, but its theaters, music halls, grocery stores, and bookshelves." 

When Katherine started working at the factory in 1917, radium was widely viewed as wonder drug and cure-all. Its intriguing shine was visually captivating, and it was viewed with awe and optimism. It spoke to America’s technological optimism, a belief that science would improve life for all.

“The dial-painters, dressed in white summer dresses and wide-brimmed hats, would eat ice-cream cones while sitting on the narrow makeshift bridge that lay across the brook by the studio, swinging their legs or holding on to one another as they tried not to fall in the water.” 

This passage characterizes the girls’ fun, happy attitude towards their work at the dial-painting studio. Their white outfits might symbolize innocence, and their ice-cream cones complete the image of young, carefree people enjoying their time at work. Despite this happy image, the reader already knows that radium will gravely harm the girls, which gives the scene an eerie quality.

“They picked up their brushes and they twirled them over and over, just as they had been taught. Lip…Dip…Paint.” 

This is the first time the refrain “lip, dip, paint” concludes a chapter. Moore uses this refrain to build a sense of anxiety and dread, like a ticking time-bomb. The repetition of the phrase evokes the mechanical quality of the task of dial painting, and its placement at the end of chapters provides a cliff-hanger quality. 

"The girls were the envy of others in the little Illinois town when they stepped out with their boyfriends at night, their dresses and hats and sometimes even their hands and faces aglow with the phosphorescence of the luminous paint." 

The dial-painters were considered lucky for working at a well-paying and enjoyable job. The radium paint dust that covered them was part of the glamor and novelty of the work. However, the danger of that paint is unknown to the women, lending an unsettling quality to the glamorous scene.

“As radium was such a rare and mysterious element, its commercial exploiters in fact controlled, to an almost monopolizing extent, its image and most of the knowledge about it.” 

While this passage describes a specific moment in radium’s industrial history, it applies to much of the book. The company-funded studies and “expert witnesses” who the company paid to testify against the women helped the radium companies exert control over radium’s image and knowledge about it. The companies had a near-monopoly on its public and scientific perception until that image began to crack. 

“That’s what it felt like when the decay in her mouth finally reached her throat. That’s how Helen died, this girl who had used to run with the wind in her skirts, making boyfriends gaze and marvel at her zest for life and her freedom. She had lived an impossibly short life, touching those who knew her; now, suddenly, she was gone.” 

Instead of merely counting Helen as one of hundreds of causalities of this fight, Moore gives a personal description of Helen as if she knew her. The passage resembles an obituary, emphasizing Helen’s vitality and personality rather than her death. Moore takes care to write about all the women this way, using vivid biographical information to make them come to life, even as the reader learns about them for their unjust deaths. 

“The caretaker at Radium Dial wiped his bare hands down his work shirt: he was covered in luminous material, his clothing stiff with it.”

Moore’s inclusion of slightly fictionalized scenes like these illustrate the common treatment of and attitude towards radium at the factories. It evokes an uneasy feeling, as we know that radium is dangerous and that the workers who are handling the substance so casually will likely become sick or die. The image of the radium-covered workers transforms from a delight, to a routine part of the workday, to a horrifying memory. 

“Not long after, USRC executives decided to launch an investigation to determine if there was anything dangerous in the work. For too long there had been rumor and suspicion; it couldn’t continue. After all—now, it was bad for business.” 

USRC launches an investigation only because the rumors are bad for business. The well-being of the workers is only a concern as far as it can lead to lawsuits and loss of profit if it suffers. This portrays the business as the main villain in the book, indicating that its interests are unconcerned with its workers for their own sake. 

“Roeder then added his own two cents. ‘We should create an atmosphere in the plant of competence,’ he wrote decidedly to Viedt. ‘An atmosphere of confidence is just as contagious as one of alarm and doubt.’” 

This passage reveals Roeder’s insistence on maintaining innocence and an air of control in the factory, even as the situation is spinning out of control for him and USRC. Instead of working to implement safety measures and improving conditions for workers, Roeder is fundamentally concerned about controlling the workers’ perception of USRC. His primary concern is maintaining power and control of knowledge.

“It was radium, lurking in Mollie Maggia’s bones, that had caused her jaw to splinter. It was radium, making itself at home in Hazel Kuser, that had eaten away at her skull until her jawbones had holes riddled right through them. It was radium, shooting out its constant rays, that was battering Marguerite Carlough’s mouth, even at this moment.”

In this passage, the Drinkers’ report is summarized. It is the first time that radium is officially identified as the cause of the mysterious illnesses. The violence of the radium is described in a way that makes the girls seem like causalities of a war. Radium is identified as the culprit, but the truth of this declaration will be suppressed repeatedly. 

“For the girls, who now understood how unforgivably careless the company had been with their lives, the real question was how the firm’s executives could have considered them expendable. Why didn’t their basic humanity compel them to end the practice of lip-pointing?”

This question is at the core of this book’s message. The power of the profit motive is set up in opposition to this “basic humanity” that Moore references in the case of radium dial-painting. The profitable business makes it nearly impossible for Roeder and other radium company executives to act in a moral way. They are essentially blinded by the company’s interests, so much so that they see the women’s lives as expendable, refusing to acknowledge their wrongdoing.

“I could if I wanted to; that is, if I am working for you people. It [is] customary for experts to testify for the people who pa[y] them.”

In this passage, Knef is trying to bribe Radium Dial’s lawyers. His statement points to the injustice and corruption of the trials. Though he is eventually turned away, this passage exposes the tactics that “experts” used to sway the results of the trial.

“And once radium poisoning was discovered, Flinn became ‘willing to play a two-faced role: to the dial-painters, he presented himself as a concerned medical expert, whereas for the company he persuaded dial-painters to accept settlements that explicitly freed the company from further liability.’” 

Flinn, like Knef, becomes a willing participant in Radium Dial’s cruelty, expecting that it will pay off monetarily for them. These two figures are depicted as shifty and despisable villains who do the dirty work of USRC. Flinn’s deceitfulness is especially enraging when he pretends to be on the side of the women and concerned for their health. 

“Her vertebrae glowed in vertical white lights, like a regiment of matches slowly burning into black. They looked like rows of shining dial-painters, walking home from work. The pictures of her skull, meanwhile, with her jawbone missing, made her mouth stretch unnaturally wide, as though she was screaming—screaming for justice through all these years. There was a smudge of dark where her eye had once been, as though she was looking out, staring accusingly, setting straight a lie that had blackened her name.” 

This unsettling passage describes Mollie’s autopsy. Here, Moore uses descriptive figurative language to highlight the unceremonious procedures of this horrific scene. Mollie is made monstrous through the radium, which glows in a ghostly way from her bones. Moore describes Mollie’s body as expressive in death, evoking the other women who will meet a similar fate. 

“Norman Thomas, meanwhile, a socialist politician who was often called ‘the conscience of America,’ declared that the case was a ‘vivid example of the ways of an unutterably selfish capitalist system which cares nothing about the lives of its workers, but seeks only to guard its profits.’” 

This mention of Thomas provides an example of the usefulness and forcefulness of the press, but only when it is listening. The media had an important role in garnering support for the women, and writers like Thomas shed light on their plight. These writers also fitted the women’s struggle into a wider political struggle against what they saw as an inherently destructive capitalist system. Though the women never were reported to engage in much political discussion, the press, as well as the lawyers, situated their struggle in a broader political agenda of workers’ rights. 

“USRC wheeled out Dr. Flinn, who pronounced that his tests showed ‘there is no 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.” 

The accusation of hysteria was commonly leveled at women who disobeyed the norms of society, expressed assertiveness, or complained about an injustice. Hysteria was a common and easy strategy to discredit women’s experiences and grievances. It was also used, for example, by anti-suffragettes to discredit the women’s movement that sought the right to vote.

“The luminous watch is purely a fad. Do you want to go ahead with the use of a thing which is so useless; which has, in spite of everything you can do, an element of serious danger in it? I certainly hope that you are going to agree that it is not worth what it costs.” 

This passage is a portion of Katherine Stewart’s speech at the industry-led radium conference. Her words point out the obvious—hundreds of women’s lives were not worth the money to be made off any consumer good. Stewart dared to acknowledge that radium was ipso facto dangerous and that no amount of precaution could remove this danger. Hers was one of the few voices of reason at the biased conference, which yielded no solid progress in making the radium industry safer. 

“When his story made the news, the headlines read: THE RADIUM WATER WORKED FINE UNTIL HIS JAW CAME OFF.”

Wealthy businessman Eben Byers’ death from radium poisoning due to drinking excessive amounts of Radithor tonic was a major news story, and a disaster for the radium industry. This evocative headline describes the same condition as many of the dial-painters and gives the condition a high-profile businessman to go along with it. This passage also nods to the role of the press in determining stories worth sharing with the public, therefore guiding public opinion of what is pressing, important, and worth their attention and care.

“The authorities reacted with much more alacrity than they had in the cases of the dial-painters. In December 1931, the FTC issued a cease-and-desist order against Radithor; the U.S. Food and Drug Administration would go on to declare radium medicines illegal.”

Though the health effects were the same for Eben as for the dial-painters, the public’s reaction was extremely different, with no doubts cast over Eben’s cause of death. This contrast illustrates the hierarchical valuing of credibility and of life that is at the core of this book. Eben, a wealthy, high-profile man, is believed and mourned, while the dial-painters, poor women, do not garner nearly as much support or credibility from the public. 

“As a dial-painter, she glowed gloriously from the radium powder; but as a woman, she shines through history with an even brighter glory: stronger than the bones that broke inside her body; more powerful than the radium that killed her or the company that shamelessly lied through its teeth; living longer than she ever did on earth, because she now lives on in the hearts and memories of those who know her only from her story.” 

This passage acts as a memorial to the intelligent young woman Grace Fryer. Moore emphasizes that Grace’s memory lives on in those who knew her story. She draws a comparison between the glow of the radium and of Grace’s personality, implying that the effects of both will be long-lived. Here, she describes Grace outshining the radium through the sheer force of her remarkable story. The radium may have killed her, but Moore has immortalized her in prose. 

“When the girls had used to play their games in the darkroom at work, they themselves had used to vanish, eclipsed by the glowing element, so that all you could see was the radium. That eclipsing effect now seemed strangely prophetic, for when people looked at Catherine these days, they didn’t see her; they saw only the effects of the grim poisoning that had taken over her body.” 

The women’s perception of radium has transformed from a wonderful marvel that they happily played with, completely carefree, to a sinister killer. Radium is visible in two ways—it glows in the dark, yet is reveals its ugliness through the destruction of Catherine’s body.

“The light of justice now flooded in, leaving the callous killers exposed for what they were. There was no full-page ad to hide behind here; no jolly superintendent smoothing down the girls’ furrowed brows; no hidden test results that kept the truth concealed. The truth, after all these years, was finally out.” 

In this passage, which describes the victorious end to the lawsuit among the Ottawa dial-painters, Moore leans on the motif of darkness and light. Justice is equated with light and injustice with darkness. It presents a final, joyous conclusion to the dial-painters’ hard-won battle. 

“‘In a silent but impressive few moments,’ a witness wrote, ‘Catherine’s best friends—the girls who worked in the plant with her and contracted the same poisoning—said good-bye. The scene brought to mind the words of the ancient gladiators of glorious Rome: ‘Moritamor te salutamus [sic]—we who are about to die salute thee.’”

The comparison of the dial-painters to gladiators implies that they died preventable deaths that served the rich. For both gladiators and dial-painters, their fates were sealed, and they lived knowing that they would soon face death. The “salute” indicates a shared struggle, as if the women are a battalion bound together by fate.