The Radium Girls Quotes

“The cynical would say there was only one reason a high-profile specialist finally took up the cause. On June 7, 1925, the first male employee of the United States Radium Corporation died.”
― Kate Moore, The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women

“And Grace Fryer was never forgotten. She is still remembered now—you are still remembering her now. As a dial-painter, she glowed gloriously from the radium powder; but as a woman, she shines through history with an even brighter glory: stronger than the bones that broke inside her body; more powerful than the radium that killed her or the company that shamelessly lied through its teeth; living longer than she ever did on earth, because she now lives on in the hearts and memories of those who know her only from her story.

Grace Fryer: the girl who fought on when all hope seemed gone; the woman who stood up for what was right, even as her world fell apart. Grace Fryer, who inspired so many to stand up for themselves.”
― Kate Moore, The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women

“You fight and you fall and you get up and fight some more. But there will always come a day when you cannot fight another minute more.”
― Kate Moore, The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women

“Radium, they noted, had a “similar chemical nature” to calcium. Thus radium “if absorbed, might have a preference for bone as a final point of fixation.” Radium was what one might call a boneseeker, just like calcium; and the human body is programmed to deliver calcium straight to the bones to make them stronger… Essentially, radium had masked itself as calcium and, fooled, the girls’ bodies had deposited it inside their bones. Radium was a silent stalker, hiding behind that mask, using its disguise to burrow deep into the women’s jaws and teeth.”
― Kate Moore, The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women

“We’ve got humane societies for dogs and cats, but they won’t do anything for human beings,” he spat out. “These women have souls.”
― Kate Moore, The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women

“My body means nothing but pain to me,” Grace revealed, “and it might mean longer life or relief to the others, if science had it. It’s all I have to give.”
― Kate Moore, The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women

“Lip… Dip… Paint.”
― Kate Moore, The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women

“Radium, he determined, was dangerous. It was just that nobody told the girls…”
― Kate Moore, The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women

“It is an offense against Morals and Humanity,” he concluded, “and, just incidentally, against the law.”
― Kate Moore, The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women

“The radium girls,” the governor announced, “deserve the utmost respect and admiration…because they battled a dishonest company, an indifferent industry, dismissive courts and the medical community in the face of certain death. I hereby proclaim September 2, 2011, as Radium Girls Day in Illinois, in recognition of the tremendous perseverance, dedication, and sense of justice the radium girls exhibited in their fight.”
― Kate Moore, The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women

“What was the first case that you heard of?” asked Berry. “I don’t remember the name,” replied Roeder coldly. The dial-painters weren’t important enough for him to recall such insignificant details.”
― Kate Moore, The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women

“Yet the flip side of the coin was all the positive literature about radium. As early as 1914, specialists knew that radium could deposit in the bones of radium users and that it caused changes in their blood. These blood changes, however, were interpreted as a good thing—the radium appeared to stimulate the bone marrow to produce extra red blood cells. Deposited inside the body, radium was the gift that kept on giving. But if you looked a little closer at all those positive publications, there was a common denominator: the researchers, on the whole, worked for radium firms. As radium was such a rare and mysterious element, its commercial exploiters in fact controlled, to an almost monopolizing extent, its image and most of the knowledge about it. Many firms had their own radium-themed journals, which were distributed free to doctors, all full of optimistic research. The firms that profited from radium medicine were the primary producers and publishers of the positive literature.”
― Kate Moore, The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women

“Gods can be kind. Loving. Benevolent. Yet as the playwright George Bernard Shaw once wrote, “The gods of old are constantly demanding human sacrifices.”
― Kate Moore, The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women

“Lip-pointing had been stopped in late 1923; Josephine Smith, the forelady, revealed: “When [the company] warning was given about pointing brushes in [our] mouths, it was explained to the girls [that] this was because the acid in the mouth spoiled the adhesive.”
― Kate Moore, The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women

“Sarah wasn’t even in her grave before her former company was denying it was to blame.”
― Kate Moore, The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women

“Why should I be so afflicted?” she would later ask. “I have never harmed a living thing. What have I done to be so punished?”
― Kate Moore, The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women

“Oh, that luminosity. That glow. Katherine Drinker was stunned by it. As the women undressed in the darkroom, she witnessed the dust lingering on their breasts, their undergarments, the inside of their thighs. It scattered everywhere, as intimate as a lover’s kiss, leaving its trace as it wound around the women’s limbs, across their cheeks, down the backs of their necks, and around their waists… Every inch of them was marked by it, by its feather-light dance that touched their soft and unseen skin. It was spectacular—and tenacious, once it had infiltrated the women’s clothing.”
― Kate Moore, The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women

“Wars are hungry machines—and the more you feed them, the more they consume.”
― Kate Moore, The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women

“The element was dubbed “liquid sunshine,”
― Kate Moore, The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women

“Radium eats the bone,” an interview with Grace later said, “as steadily and surely as fire burns wood.”
― Kate Moore, The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women

“The girls,” remembered a local resident of the time, “were ‘good Catholic girls’ who were raised not to challenge authority.”
― Kate Moore, The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women

“What the girls had achieved was astonishing: a ground-breaking, law-changing, and life-saving accomplishment.”
― Kate Moore, The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women

“Catherine Wolfe, fired for being sick, swung open the glass door at the entrance of the studio. It was six steps down to the sidewalk, and on every one she felt her hip ache. Nine years she had given them. It had meant nothing.”
― Kate Moore, The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women

“Within sixty hours, Sarah’s bones caused exposure on the film: white fog-like patches against the ebony black. Just as the girls’ glow had once done, as they walked home through the streets of Orange after work, her bones had made a picture: an eerie, shining light against the dark.”
― Kate Moore, The Radium Girls

“The residue from radium extraction looked like seaside sand, and the company had offloaded this industrial waste by selling it to schools and playgrounds to use in their children’s sandboxes; kids’ shoes were reported to have turned white because of it, while one little boy complained to his mother of a burning sensation in his hands. Yet, in comments that made reassuring reading, von Sochocky pronounced the sand “most hygienic”10 for children to play in, “more beneficial than the mud of world-renowned curative baths.”11”
― Kate Moore, The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women

“The cynical would say there was only one reason a high-profile specialist finally took up the cause. On June 7, 1925, the first male employee of the United States Radium Corporation died. “The first case that was called to my attention,” Martland later remarked, “was a Dr.”
― Kate Moore, The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women

“With a half-life of 1,600 years, radium could take its time to make itself known.”
― Kate Moore, The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women

“Yet she was brave about it. “It had to be done,” she went on, “had to be told, or else how would we be able to fight for the justice that was due us?”13”
― Kate Moore, The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women

“The dial-painters’ case ultimately led to the establishment of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which now works nationally in the United States to ensure safe working conditions.”
― Kate Moore, The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women

“the hospitals where she’d been treated refused to release her records.”
― Kate Moore, The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women