The Radium Girls

 The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women by Kate Moore, 506 pages.

In the early twentieth century radium was being hailed as the world's newest miracle. It was in (or allegedly in) medicines, beauty products, and, perhaps most commonly, glowing watch dials. Radium dial painting got it's biggest boom during WWI, when radium was used to paint luminous displays on military equipment, but after the war was over civilian demand for luminous watch faces didn't decline, and many millions were produced. The women who painted the dials, generally young and working class, eventually began to sicken and die from internal radiation poisoning. And, although the companies knew the radium wasn't safe long before the truly horrific deaths and disfigurements began, they did everything in their power to deny it.

This book follows both the original dial painters in New Jersey and dial painters from a studio that went up a number of years later in Ottawa, Illinois. It begins in the early days of dial painting when it was absolutely the most coveted job around, and follows several women through the horrible decline in their health (and in many cases, deaths), and through the decades long legal battles to hold the companies accountable for the damage they had done to the women.

This book is absolutely haunting. Part of the horror comes from the benefit of hindsight (ie, as a modern person who knows about radiation the fact that the girls painted their faces with radioactive material and ate their lunches at their workstations is horrifying), and the other part comes from absolutely stunning displays of corporate cruelty, which even expecting the worst from them is still surprising. This is a powerful work of nonfiction, but it is also very intense. I'm glad I finally got around to reading it after many years of having it on my tbr list. 

Fun Fact: Radium watches were only discontinued in 1968