User:Napiem/The Radium Girls (book)

Synopsis
The Radium Girls is a non-fictional award winning true recount of the injustice done to a group of young women in Orange, New Jersey and Ottawa, Illinois compiled by Kate Moore. The story highlights a group of young dial painters who were unknowingly consuming poisonous radium. Radium, a deadly substance, has affected these women and their everyday lives to a point that it left most of these women dead, or bed bound. This story follows these women and their families as their ailment by radium is pursued medically and lawfully in the search of answers and justice.

Among the various themes that this book portrays is labor exploitation and how the companies were not held accountable until the women were fatally ill. For example, the women were advised to lip, dip, and paint and this method was designed for the precise work of the watches, despite the radium causing harmful effects. The only benefit of the job was that it was good pay and it was supposed to be a liberating experience for these women because it was a job where they could be independent both physically and financially. So, when the radium started affecting these women it was horrifying because it was debilitating to their health. Despite the decline in the women’s health, the job was long hours with limited breaks and no socializing because they didn’t want distractions, they sacrificed a lot to maintain their careers until noticeable health defects occurred.

Labor Exploitation
Kate Moore's Radium Girls captured the zeiltigest of 1920's

The Perceived Objectivity of Medical and Scientific Testing
Scientific evidence was manipulated repeatedly. For example, Dr. Flinn conducted medical tests on the dial-painters with a radon breath test, but he held the device far from the women’s mouths so the radium dissipated before it entered the device (Moore). Flinn was also deceitful about his medical credentials—being perceived as a medical doctor gave him much more credibility as an arbiter of neutral facts, rather than a company puppet willing to lie and deceive on their behalf. Another example of manipulation is when Rufus Reed, the supervisor at the Ottawa plant, only selected some dial-painters for testing and denied Catherine Wolf the opportunity to be tested. Reed was intentionally biasing the data while maintaining the appearance of neutrality.