In this episode, Katie is bewitched by the tragic story of the Radium Girls.

Hundreds of young women were thrilled at the chance to paint clock faces and dials with a new kind of glow-in-the-dark paint in the 1920s. Factories that produced these new products paid three times as much as similar employers, with the added bonus of free access to the highly valuable radium that gave its paint its signature glow. At the time, radium was being added to everything from water to makeup and was touted as a miracle cure. But within a few short years, the dial painters were suffering from everything from tumors to teeth loss. Dubbed the "radium girls" these brave women spent their final years locked in battle with the corporations that poisoned them.

What we are reading:
The Paris Library by Janet Skeslien Charles
Mad About You by Mhairi McFarlane

Recommended:
The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women by Kate Moore
Radium Girls: Women and Industrial Health Reform, 1910-1935 by Claudia Clark
The Woman They Could Not Silence: One Woman, Her Incredible Fight for Freedom, and the Men Who Tried to Make Her Disappear by Kate Moore
Glow by Megan E. Bryant
Radio Girls by Sarah-Jane Stratford
The Last Ballad by Wiley Cash

Links:
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/10/we-used-to-put-radium-in-coffee/263408/

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/14/nyregion/mae-keane-who-painted-watch-dials-with-a-radium-mixture-dies-at-107.html

https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2016-09/documents/radionuclides.pdf

https://nypost.com/2017/03/22/skin-glowing-from-radium-ghost-girls-died-for-a-greater-cause/

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/curies-isolate-radium

https://www.cnn.com/style/article/radium-girls-radioactive-paint/index.html