Summary, Analysis, and Review of Kate Moore’s The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women

PLEASE NOTE: This is a key takeaways and analysis of the book and NOT the original book.

Start Publishing Notes’ Summary, Analysis, and Review of Kate Moore’s The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women includes a summary of the book, review, analysis & key takeaways, and detailed “About the Author” section.

PREVIEW: The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women by Kate Moore is a gruesome account of the effects of radium on young women who worked with radium-based paint in the first part of the twentieth century. Centering on two exploitative radium plants in Orange, New Jersey and Ottawa, Illinois, the sad story follows the lives and deaths of female workers who became known as the radium girls.
Radium has been known to be a dangerous substance since 1901, but it wasn’t always widely recognized as such. This was for a lot of reasons, including the fragmented medical community, a lack of regulation in the United States, and the general sense of awe surrounding radium, which was then known as a miraculous material. When a watch dial-painting studio opened in Newark, New Jersey in 1916, young women in their teens and twenties clamored to work there. Little did they know the radium-based paint they used would poison their bodies and, eventually, steal their lives.