We’re reading The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women. If you have your hands on a copy, this week we wanted to read up to the end of Chapter 13.. If you haven’t been able to grab a copy, don’t worry, you can catch up later.
For next week, try to read up to the end of Chapter 20, which is the first chapter of part two.
This week, we started to see the deadly consequences of radium on the unsuspecting women who worked with it. We saw some of the denials, and the deliberate cover-ups, and the heroic women and their problem-solving dentists who fought to get these occupational diseases handled.
How did you feel about these chapters? How do you feel about the book so far?
The more things change, the more they stay the same. I was struck by how we as a society have done nothing to stop the greed of companies and how they treat women.
A successful well-respected company doing work that helped the war effort and did so many good things. Young, less than high-school graduate working class women doing a job that paid well and helped them until they could get married and stay home and raise children. Dental problems with no obvious cause at a time when medicine was just beginning to be a scientific field. Doctors who would come to any conclusion you paid them to come to. Medical care that was bankrupting families 100 years ago. (Sound familiar.) A disease that no one knew about and a fragmented system of care. Corporations by definition are immoral. With COVID-19, you see some of the same issues. Unnecessary deaths, politicians acting like corporations and working class much more affected. Things just move faster these days.
I like the storytelling of the book. It gives you a sense of how things evolved and how the various humans were reacting and affected.
Disintegration! What a brutal absolutely godawful way to suffer and die!! Also that company photograph of all the girls is so unbelievably haunting. "As the shutter closed, it captured them all together, frozen in time for just one moment. The girls of Radium Dial, outside their studio forever young and happy and well. On the photographic film at least"
The more things change, the more they stay the same. I was struck by how we as a society have done nothing to stop the greed of companies and how they treat women.
A successful well-respected company doing work that helped the war effort and did so many good things. Young, less than high-school graduate working class women doing a job that paid well and helped them until they could get married and stay home and raise children. Dental problems with no obvious cause at a time when medicine was just beginning to be a scientific field. Doctors who would come to any conclusion you paid them to come to. Medical care that was bankrupting families 100 years ago. (Sound familiar.) A disease that no one knew about and a fragmented system of care. Corporations by definition are immoral. With COVID-19, you see some of the same issues. Unnecessary deaths, politicians acting like corporations and working class much more affected. Things just move faster these days.
I like the storytelling of the book. It gives you a sense of how things evolved and how the various humans were reacting and affected.
Disintegration! What a brutal absolutely godawful way to suffer and die!! Also that company photograph of all the girls is so unbelievably haunting. "As the shutter closed, it captured them all together, frozen in time for just one moment. The girls of Radium Dial, outside their studio forever young and happy and well. On the photographic film at least"