The Radium Girls
As World War I raged across the globe, hundreds of young women toiled away at the radium-dial factories, where they painted clock faces with a mysterious new substance called radium. Assured by their bosses that the luminous material was safe, the women themselves shone brightly in the dark, covered from head to toe with the glowing dust. With such a coveted job, these "shining girls" were considered the luckiest alive--until they began to fall mysteriously ill. As the fatal poison of the radium took hold, they found themselves embroiled in one of America's biggest scandals and a groundbreaking battle for workers' rights. The Radium Girls explores the strength of extraordinary women in the face of almost impossible circumstances and the astonishing legacy they left behind.
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Starting in 1917, hundreds of young women in Orange, New Jersey and Ottawa, Illinois were hired to paint glow-in-the-dark watch dials with radium, told to lip-point their brushes between strokes. Kate Moore tracks their court fight against the dial companies as their bones began to give way.
Yes. The Radium Girls is Kate Moore's nonfiction account of the young female factory workers who painted radium dials in the 1910s and 1920s, became fatally ill, and sued their employers in landmark workers'-rights cases.
Yes. A 2018 indie film, Radium Girls, drew on the same history. A larger production has been announced based directly on Kate Moore's book; as of 2025 it remains in development.
The Radium Girls was written by Kate Moore, published in 2016 by Sourcebooks.
The Radium Girls is 480 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Radium Girls takes most readers 7 to 10 hours to finish.
The Radium Girls is a standalone novel by Kate Moore, not part of a series.
The Radium Girls is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
