Radium Girls - Book Summary

Radium Girls by Kate Moore is a documentation of the struggle of a group of girls who ended up changing American workforce laws a lot. The book follows the lives of girls who started with relatively normal lives, working in their early teenage years. However, these girls ended up being employed by the Radium Dial Company, who made glow in the dark watches using the newfound technology of radium. In the early 1900s, when radium was first discovered, it was considered the wonder drug and was used almost everywhere. However, as we now know, radium is highly radioactive and very dangerous.

These girls were given the very simple task of painting the watch face using the paint they mixed themselves, but there was a catch: there was a smidge of radium (which also happened to be very expensive at the time) in the paint. However, because they had to paint very thin strokes and the paintbrush bristles often spread out, they needed to wet the paintbrush. The employers initially gave them glasses of water to dip in but determined they were wasting too much radium, so they withdrew those glasses, leading to the required use of licking the brush to maintain the thin composition, thus leading to "lip, dip, paint" is the way that they created these watches.

As time passed, the girls slowly grew up and left the factory for better work, or because they got married, but they continued to have lasting effects from licking the radium. In fact, one girl ended up so sick that her mouth literally fell apart, with all her teeth and eventually the jaw completely coming out. In the beginning, many of these cases were written off as syphilis, because the symptoms were very similar, but the doctors were aware that this was something that they had never seen before. At some point, various doctors concluded that the radium had something to do with all of these symptoms.

Eventually, this leads to 5 girls, Grace Fryer, Edna Hussman, Katherine Schaub, Quinta McDonald, and Albina Larice to sue the Radium Dial Company, and this case, while starting out very slowly, gained traction with media and ignited widespread change throughout the US. This lawsuit triggered many labor standard laws and workforce safety laws, and in the end, the girls won the lawsuit, earning themselves about $150,000 dollars in today's money as well as a running income of $200 a week, plus all medical expenses covered.