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“You fight and you fall and you get up and fight some more. But there will always come a day when you cannot fight another minute more.”

Release Date: May 2nd, 2017

Genre(s): Non-fiction, Science/Technology, History, Feminism

Publisher: Sourcebooks

Pages: 479

Rating:⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️.5

Synopsis

The Radium Girls is a non-fiction book that follows the events shortly after the discovery of radium. While the popular new element can be found in products everywhere, the women working with it in factories are beginning to fall ill. The women’s cries for help and the fight for worker’s rights are ignored, leading to one of the biggest scandals of the early 20th century.

Review

The Radium Girls was on my TBR for the longest time, and after reading this book I regret not reading it sooner. Despite it’s disturbing, yet detailed content, I managed to read this book within a weekend. I can’t believe what these women went through, and how hard they had to fight just to be treated with basic respect.

I was anticipating that reading this book would take me at least a week, between the content of this novel and the historical detail in order to fully comprehend it. However, The Radium Girls is written much like a story would be, so if you’re accustomed to reading fiction and want to read non-fiction, this is a good book to start with. The Radium Girls is so well-researched and written in such a way that it’s easy to visualize the working conditions at the factory and other prominent settings. There are also so many women in this story, and Moore is able to keep all of their stories in order. When first seeing the list of people at the beginning of the book, I was concerned about keeping all of their stories together. However, it was very easy to differentiate between all of the people, their families, and their stories in this book.

Between the complications of radium poisoning and the subsequent legal battles they fought, it’s so hard to believe what these women had to go through. At times in this book, there are highly detailed accounts of the women’s medical complications they suffered, and for the company to turn a blind eye to all of these cases was disgusting. And with each time that one of the Radium Girls began to fight Radium Dial, I couldn’t bring myself to put the book down. I needed to know if it would finally be the day that these women would be served justice. Their fights were long and brutal. 

The only thing that prevents me from rating this a full five stars is the epilogue. I’m willing to call this a five-star read anyway, but I wish we got so much more from the epilogue! The epilogue essentially tells the impact of the Radium Girls, and what their fights have paved way to in terms of workers’ rights, how they shaped the further research of elements in places like The Manhattan Project, and what the cleanup looks like for the Radium Dial site. (They were still performing cleanup at the site as of 2015!) I would have loved to learn more about these things, and others, to essentially learn in detail what considerations were made after these women fought to show the world what radium really does. One of my biggest takeaways of this book is that the work that these women paved the way (and sacrificed their lives) for what we know today, but their history is not as often acknowledged. That being said, I would have loved to read several chapters on their impacts. 

But all in all, The Radium Girls was nothing short of an excellent book. Between the extensive detail and the true story that it tells, I regret not picking up this book earlier. I know that this book is on a lot of people’s lists to consider as well, so if that’s you, I highly recommend reading this book. Or even if that’s not you – give this book a read.