Showing results for "Kate Moore" in Americas

In 1917, as a war raged across the world, young American women flocked to work, painting watches, clocks, and military dials with a special luminous substance made from radium. It was a fun job, lucrative and glamorous - the girls themselves shone brightly in the dark, covered head to toe in the dust from the paint. They were the radium girls. As the years passed, the women began to suffer from mysterious and crippling illnesses. The very thing that had made them feel alive was in fact killing them.

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.