This is the riveting story about the young (and I mean young, they were in their teens) women who went to work for the radium dial factories in Newark and Orange, New Jersey and Ottawa, Illinois to paint the dials of clocks and watches with the luminous substance. They were assured that it was perfectly safe. They were taught to Lip...Dip...Paint in order to maintain a perfect point on their brushes, thereby ingesting the radium paint. They went home covered in radium powder from mixing the paint. Some even painted their nails and teeth with the paint as a joke. After all, it was perfectly safe.
Soon some of the girls started feeling ill. They had severe dental problems. Their teeth started falling out. They became anemic. Their bones ached. Their jaws disintegrated. They developed sarcomas.
In the face of all this, the companies denied any responsibility. Radium was safe, they said.
The young women fought back.
This is their story.
The first part of the book introduces the young women. There are a lot of them and initially it is hard to keep them all straight. The book alternates between the New Jersey women and the Ottawa women. Eventually you get to know them and sort through them, and grow to care about them as people. Their suffering was horrific and hard to read, but if they could live through it, we can stand to read it, to honor their memories.
The second part of the book deals with the court case in New Jersey, the women trying to get justice for what that company did to them. The company's level of duplicity is outrageous. These women were dying and all they cared about was their liability and profits.
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