When one of the first girls to die was exhumed for an autopsy to prove she had died of radium poisoning, the unearthed coffin "seemed to glow with an unnatural light."ĭoctors and dentists were bewildered by the symptoms and eventually grew suspicious of the true cause. Once embedded in their bodies, the radium was impossible to remove. Their bones thinned and snapped, they grew dreadful tumors, their mouths and throats rotted away and their jaw bones deteriorated. The physical and emotional suffering of these women as their radiation poisoning advanced makes for harrowing reading, and Moore describes it with all the merciless detail that one of their outraged doctors or loving relatives might want the world to know. Moore did extensive research in the United States, interviewing many of the women's families, visiting their workplaces, homes and graves in Illinois and New Jersey, and studying court documents, letters and personal diaries. Moore's personal passion for the stories of the radium girls is evident in her sympathy for them and in her deep knowledge of every detail of their personal experiences, environments and the laws they fought to change. One girl "painted the material all over her teeth one night before a date, wanting a smile that would knock him dead." And then they began to get sick. They took paint home, to paint their faces and decorate the walls. The clinging radium dust made them glow as they walked home in the dark. Thanks to their relatively high wages, they became the stylish glamour girls of their towns. When the women asked if it might be dangerous to swallow traces of the paint, they were told it was harmless. To paint the numerals, they mixed their own radium paint on their work tables, and they were taught to point their fine brushes between their lips. Most were teenagers when they started work, thrilled at their luck, proud of their new earning power. It was "a magnificent cure-all" wealthy people "drank it as a tonic the recommended dose was five to seven glasses a day." During World War I there was a great need for luminous watch dials, and hand-painting them was one of the most desirable jobs a working-class girl could get. In 1917, radium was a glamorous new substance, magical and expensive. When she looked to learn more about them, Moore realized no book existed about the resilient, courageous women from their perspectives, so she set out to write one herself. She was deeply moved by the 1920s and '30s-era female factory workers who, despite their class, poverty and the agonies of radium poisoning, successfully fought their employers for compensation and lobbied for health and safety legislation that still benefits workers today. Kerry McHugh, blogger at Entomology of a Bookwormīritish writer and theater director Kate Moore ( Scone with the Wind: Cakes and Bakes with a Literary Twist) first encountered the stories of the Radium Girls while producing the play These Shining Lives. Whatever your Mother's Day celebrations may look like this year, consider including one-or several-of these personal reflections on motherhood in your day. Here, 16 writers (mostly women, but some men) write with heart about their decisions not to have children-and about the taboo that still surrounds such a decision. Reflections on motherhood, of course, don't start and end with the decision to have children, as evidenced by Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed. and I am speaking to you all." Within this framework, she builds a collection of moving essays on her childhood, on bravery and fear, on friendship and food and all the makings of a life well lived. "I gave birth to one child, a son," she writes in the introduction to Letter to My Daughter, "but I have thousands of daughters. Maya Angelou, too, framed personal essays as a letter to her (fictional) daughter. Bergen's suggestions, however, like Williams's writing, veer into personal recollection and ruminations on what it means to be a mother (and daughter) in modern times. Framed as a letter penned to her daughter, the book is ostensibly a collection of life advice. Margaux Bergen's Navigating Life: Things I Wish My Mother Had Told Me offers her daughter a guide to that womanhood. As her desire to understand her own mother kaleidoscopes inward and outward, Williams explores her own experience in the context of what it means to be a mother, a daughter and a woman. Williams's attempt to understand that blankness forms the core of her poetic, philosophical collection of personal essays, When Women Were Birds: Fifty-Four Ruminations on Voice. When her mother died, Terry Tempest Williams inherited her 54 blank journals.
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