I don’t get nearly enough time to read as I’d like. But, reading is a great way to relax when your work is watching TV and staring at screens for the better part of everyday. I picked out these two books with one of my friends a few weeks ago after we saw one of my favorite bands, Clan of Xymox. The show was fantastic. There’s videos on my Instagram.
But back to the books. The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women and The League of Lady Poisoners: Illustrated True Stories of Dangerous Women
I’ve been interested in the stories of the Radium Girls for a long time, because it’s such a tragic story. Teens and young women were hired in factories to handpaint watch dials with radium to make them glow in the dark. At the time, radium was being touted as a “miracle cure” and a wonder element.
In order to do the fine detail painting, the girls were encouraged to “lip, dip, paint” – wet the tips of their fine brushes with their lips, dip the brush into the radium paint, then paint the dial. And then repeat over, and, over, and over. You can imagine how much radium they ingested…
But the jobs paid very well, and women didn’t have a lot of high-paying options. And the women were told radium was perfectly safe. Spoiler alert: it absolutely wasn’t. It was the horrific effects of the radium that finally led to medical research being done. But the women died agonizing deaths and many went broke trying to even get a diagnosis.
I also heard a really interesting interview on satellite radio with Tom Morello, most famously of Rage Against The Machine, whose family has ties to the town where one of the infamous radium factories operated in Ottawa, IL. His grandmother was a nurse in the hospital where some of the poisoned girls were treated. He even write a kick-ass song about them:
The Radium Girls is definitely worth a read. Fascinating, although it can be hard to read about some of the specific things that happened to the women.
I just started The League of Lady Poisoners but so far, it’s DELIGHTFUL. The illustrations are a Dark Academia fever dream, and there’s a mix of stories and practical information. No actual poison recipes, which is a little disappointing. But still worth reading!