The Radium Girls

I recently finished Kate Moore‘s The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women. I chose to read this book because of its relation to topics about radiation risk in Intermediate Physics for Medicine and Biology, but I soon discovered that it isn’t about medical physics. Rather, it focuses on the young women who suffered from occupational radiation exposure. After reviewing previous books about the radium girls, Moore writes:

“As a storyteller and a non-academic, I was struck by the fact that the books focused on the legal and scientific aspects of the women’s story, and not on the compelling lives of the girls themselves. In fact, I soon discovered that no book existed that put the radium girls center stage and told the story from their perspective. The individual women who had fought and died for justice had been eclipsed by their historic achievements; they were now known only by the anonymous moniker of ‘the Radium Girls.’ Their unique experiences—their losses and their loves; their triumphs and their terrors—had been forgotten, if ever charted in the first place.

I became determined to correct that omission.”

The job of a radium girl was to paint luminous dials on clocks and instruments, so you could see them in the dark. They used a radioluminescent paint containing radioactive radium mixed with a scintillator such as zinc-sulfide. Most worked for either the United States Radium Corporation in Orange, New Jersey, or the Radium Dial Company in Ottawa, Illinois. Their supervisors taught them to make a fine point on their paint brush by putting it in their mouth, a process called lip-pointing. Each time they lip-pointed, they ingested a bit of radium.