The Radium Girls: Young Readers’ Edition: The Scary but True Story of the Poison that Made People Glow in the Dark

“Explore the unbelievable true story of America’s glowing girls and their fight for justice in the young readers edition of the New York Times and USA Todaybestseller The Radium Girls. This enthralling new edition includes all-new material, including a glossary, timeline, and dozens of bonus photos.”

Amid the excitement of the early twentieth century, hundreds of young women spend their days hard at work painting watch dials with glow-in-the-dark radium paint. The painters consider themselves lucky—until they start suffering from a mysterious illness. As the corporations try to cover up a shocking secret, these shining girls suddenly find themselves at the center of a deadly scandal.

The Radium Girls: Young Readers Edition tells the unbelievable true story of these incredible women, whose determination to fight back saved countless lives.This new edition of the national bestseller is perfect for:Educators looking for history books for kids ages 9 to 12, nonfiction books for kids, biographies for kids, and real stories around the industrial revolution, chemistry, and scienceParents, educators, and librarians looking for stories about strong women, inspiring books for girls, childrens books about women in history, and famous women books for girlsYoung readers who want to read one of the most inspiring and shocking narratives of the early 20th century.

I accidentally put this Young Reader version on hold at the library instead of the adult version and I’m okay with that. I did right away put the other on hold and intend to read it as well.
It will be interesting to read them both.

The Radium Girls were female factory workers who contracted radiation poisoning from painting watch dials with self-luminous paint. The painting was done by women at three different factories, and the term now applies to the women working at the facilities: one in Orange, New Jersey, beginning around 1917; one in Ottawa, Illinois, beginning in the early 1920s; and a third facility in Waterbury, Connecticut.

After being told that the paint was harmless, the women in each facility ingested deadly amounts of radium after being instructed to “point” their brushes on their lips in order to give them a fine tip; some also painted their fingernails, face and teeth with the glowing substance. The women were instructed to point their brushes in this way because using rags or a water rinse caused them to use more time and material, as the rinse was made from powdered radium, gum arabic and water.

Five of the women in New Jersey challenged their employer in a case over the right of individual workers who contract occupational diseases to sue their employers under New Jersey’s occupational injuries law, which at the time had a two-year statute of limitations, but settled out of court in 1928. Five women in Illinois who were employees of the Radium Dial Company (which was unaffiliated with the United States Radium Corporation) sued their employer under Illinois law, winning damages in 1938.

Eleanor Swanson’s Poem :

Radium Girls

We sat at long tables side by side in a big 

dusty room where we laughed and carried 

on until they told us to pipe down and paint. 

The running joke was how we glowed, 

the handkerchiefs we sneezed into lighting 

up our purses when we opened them at night, 

our lips and nails, painted for our boyfriends 

as a lark, simmering white as ash in a dark room. 

“Would you die for science?” the reporter asked us, 

Edna and me, the main ones in the papers. 

Science? We mixed up glue, water and radium 

powder into a glowing greenish white paint, 

and painted watch dials with a little 

brush, one number after another, taking 

one dial after another, all day long, 

from the racks sitting next to our chairs. 

After a few strokes, the brush lost its shape, 

and our bosses told us to point it with 

our lips. Was that science? 

I quit the watch factory to work in a bank, 

and thought I’d gotten class, more money, 

a better life, until I lost a tooth in back 

and two in front and my jaw filled up with sores. 

We sued: Edna, Katherine, Quinta, Larice and me, 

but when we got to court, not one of us 

could raise our arms to take the oath. 

My teeth were gone by then. “Pretty Grace 

Fryer,” they called me in the papers. 

All of us were dying. 

We heard the scientist in France, Marie 

Curie, could not believe “the manner 

in which we worked” and how we tasted 

that pretty paint a hundred times a day. 

Now, even our crumbling bones 

will glow forever in the black earth. 

How were the radium girls poisoned?  

Doctors investigating the cases of radium poisoning among the factory workers noted that it had a ‘similar chemical nature’ to calcium. 

Thus radium ‘if absorbed, might have a preference for bone as a final point of fixation.’ 

Radium was what one might call a boneseeker, just like calcium; and the human body is programmed to deliver calcium straight to the bones to make them stronger.

Essentially, radium had masked itself as calcium and, fooled, the girls’ bodies had deposited it inside their bones. Radium was a silent stalker, hiding behind that mask, using its disguise to burrow deep into the women’s jaws and teeth.

As early as 1914, specialists knew that radium could deposit in the bones of radium users and that it caused changes in their blood. These blood changes, however, were interpreted as a good thing—the radium appeared to stimulate the bone marrow to produce extra red blood cells. Deposited inside the body, radium was the gift that kept on giving. 

But if you looked a little closer at all those positive publications, there was a common denominator: the researchers, on the whole, worked for radium firms. As radium was such a rare and mysterious element, its commercial exploiters in fact controlled, to an almost monopolizing extent, its image and most of the knowledge about it. 

Many firms had their own radium-themed journals, which were distributed free to doctors, all full of optimistic research. The firms that profited from radium medicine were the primary producers and publishers of the positive literature.

Extracted from Radium Girls by Kate Moore