“I Googled and found the play “These Shining Girls,” about the Ottawa, Illinois, radium girls,” she said. Moore said she discovered the amazing story of the radium girls while searching for a play to produce for women. “The book tells precisely why we need regulation for health and safety on the job and why it’s important we fight for our rights,” Moore said.
Moore, who formerly worked as a ghost writer and editor in the United Kingdom, has written a formidable creative nonfiction look at the women’s private lives as they are slowly dying. The women in “The Radium Girls” are told by their employers that there is no danger in using radium, in fact, they are told radium is a health aid. Cancer and bone deterioration can rot their insides until the point their jawbones literally disintegrate. The workers called it “lip, dip, paint.” Most who contract radium poisoning die excruciating deaths and exhibit physical deformities. They would then dip the point in the radium paint before painting, sometimes repeating the process up to 600 times a day for watches. To paint the delicate dials, the young women would “lip point” by putting the point of the brush in their mouth and twirling their tongues to create a fine tip. Rather it’s a true mid- 20th century story about a group of young women that receive radium poisoning after painting watch and instrument dials with a special type of paint. Moore’s tome, however, is not science fiction. writer Kate Moore would make a great movie. Characters in the book have radium poisoning and suffer true horror - so yes, the 2016 book by U.K. “The Radium Girls” sounds like the name of a 50s sci-fi horror movie, and the similarities extend beyond the title.