![]() You write about these women coming home from the factory, covered in radium and glowing in the dark. Sarah Zhang: Even a century later, reading about how radium glows in the dark sounds kind of magical. Our conversation, condensed and edited for clarity, is below. I spoke to Moore about her book and the legacy of the dial painters. A free ebook excerpt is available now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Google Play, and the book comes out in the U.S. With their cautionary tales in mind, scientists on the Manhattan Project learned to protect themselves from radiation. Their lawsuits were key to reinforcing the U.S.’s nascent workplace safety standards. ![]() In the a new book titled The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women, Kate Moore tells the story of how these dial painters took on the radium companies that made them sick-as they were dying of radium poisoning. Their radium-filled bones were being bombarded with radiation from the inside. So all that radium the women licked off of their paintbrushes actually ended up in their bones, like calcium would have. The human body, it turns out, easily mistakes radium for calcium. Their jaw bones-brittle and degraded-broke at a light touch. Then years later, after they stopped working the factories, the women started getting mysteriously ill. These products didn’t actually all contain the expensive and precious element, but the evocation of radium gave them a healthful glow. You could buy radium water, radium face cream, radium toothpaste, and even Radium Brand Creamery Butter. Plus, radium was supposed to be good for you. They were even taught to paint tiny numbers on the dials by licking their paintbrushes to a fine point. ![]() The young women had no reason to worry about radium then. The paint got onto their hands, into their hair, and settled on their clothes. During World War I and the years thereafter, dozens of teenage girls and young women worked in radium-dial factories, painting glow-in-the-dark numbers onto watches and airplane instruments. The depths of emotions aren’t plumbed - when one character announces a piece of her jaw has just fallen out, there’s puzzlingly little horror or panic among her loved ones.They would, quite literally, glow. Little attention is paid to the vernacular or physicality of the period. Low-budget period pieces face the formidable challenge of making the time and place feel immediate “Radium” isn’t helped by the filmmakers’ habit of interspersing archival footage they can’t quite match with new digitally “aged” shots featuring their characters. However, as with “Call to Spy,” there’s a lack of texture and experiential quality to “Radium Girls.” Co-director Lydia Dean Pilcher again shows an eye for intriguing historical material (she also directed this year’s “A Call to Spy”). A romantic subplot is thrown in, with questionable necessity. Despite this dramatic license, the film lurches toward cliché, with surprise witnesses and evidence sprung on the other side in the courtroom. “Radium Girls”: Based on a true story, women working in a factory using radium in the 1920s fall ill their court battle would make history. Considering the company doctor’s humiliating diagnosis of Josephine’s sickness and the wealthy corporation’s resources, how can a group of impoverished legal novices prevail? Abby Quinn (“Little Women”) plays the other sister, Josephine, a star worker with enthusiasm for ancient Egypt and for her work - until she falls mysteriously ill as well. Her sister, Mary, has died before we meet the family, which does not suspect a lethal connection to her job. Joey King (“The Act”) plays Bessie, one of three sisters to work at the factory. When workers began to sicken and die in conspicuous numbers, a handful of the rest brought suit against the company, which had maintained that the substance was safe. They were even instructed to bring the brushes to a finer point by putting them between their lips. Workers, mostly women, were exposed to tremendous amounts of the radioactive material. (here, “American Radium”) thrived by selling glow-in-the-dark watches with numbers hand-painted with actual radium. The case had a lasting impact on workplace protections, though possibly not as enduring as the effect the radiation the women were exposed to would have on their bodies.įrom the 1910s through the ’20s, the United States Radium Corp. Though the title may sound like science fiction or some rock-and-roll romp, “Radium Girls” gets its name from the plaintiffs in a real court case about an American tragedy during the Progressive Era.
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