Nutshell:In the same vein as Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, The Radium Girls digs into a forgotten, swept-under piece of history and tells the stories of the women who fought for their rights – and their lives – as the corporations that they worked for continued to say that radium was safe. A powerful, heartbreaking read.
Story: In the early 20th Century, the United States hired women to paint watch dials. Paint them with radium. Now we know that stuff is incredibly dangerous and could kill you…and that’s thanks in large part to the women who worked day and night, painting watches. And licking the radium-covered brushes so the brush point would be nice and sharp.
“It was a technique called lip-pointing, inherited from the first girls who had worked in the industry, who came from china-painting factories. Unbeknownst to the girls, it wasn’t the way things were done in Europe…” Continue reading
