The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women

By Kate Moore

Categories: History

The Radium Girls is a 2017 nonfiction book by British writer Kate Moore, published by Sourcebooks. It tells the story of the young women who painted watch dials with glowing radium paint in American factories during the 1910s and 1920s, licking their brushes to a fine point as they were taught. As the workers fell ill with radium poisoning, several of them took the companies to court. Moore follows women in New Jersey and Ottawa, Illinois, and shows how their legal fight helped change workplace safety rules.

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• Emma Watson: “we do know that this is a brilliant nonfiction book, so compellingly told, that it reads like fiction and deserves wide-spread attention.”