Naperville, Ill. : Sourcebooks, [2018]
xviii, 477 p. : ill. ; 214 cm.
This is a fantastic book that ties several important periods of US history together - WWI, The Roaring Twenties and The Great Depression. It also has a local interest in that half the drama of the story is in Ottawa, IL about an hour and forty-five minute drive from here in Urbana.
But it's a tough book, too. It's the story of literally murderous corporate exploitation and dishonesty that shortened the lives of hundreds of women who worked in the factories where the luminous (and dangerously radioactive) radium was painted on wartime instrument panels and on civilian-use watch dials. The deaths of several of the women featured in the book are slow, agonizing, and terrible to read about. What makes the book inspiring, though, is the courage, grit and determination of the victimized women as they take on the companies that used and abused them - and eventually win significant victories.
This book has a lot of heart. The author succeeds in putting the reader into the lives of the women who worked in the radium-dial industry - capturing the initial excitement of well-paid employment for young women of the twenties and the freedom it gave them, and humanizing the gruesome and tragic illnesses that stalked these young women several years after they started the work.
The book is a great lesson about the dangers of unregulated corporate behavior, the power of unified resistance, and the importance of family, friends, community and the media in taking on powerful foes. It's a long, but very worthy read for anyone interested in US history.
