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ABOUT THE BOOK
NO SPOILERSThe Radium Girls is the true story of young American women hired to paint glowing numbers on watch dials. On February 1, 1917, fourteen-year-old Katherine Schaub starts work at a dial studio in Newark, New Jersey, where each girl mixes her own paint from radium powder, a substance sold at the time as a wonder cure. When America enters the First World War, the company moves to a bigger plant in Orange, New Jersey, and hires many more girls, including Grace Fryer and the Maggia sisters. The pay is among the best a working-class girl can find, and the dust makes their clothes and hair glow as they walk home at night. They are taught to shape each brush to a fine point with their lips, a routine they repeat all day: "lip, dip, paint." In 1922 a different firm, the Radium Dial Company, opens a studio in the old high school in Ottawa, Illinois, where a shy orphan named Catherine Wolfe signs on and an instructress eats the glowing material to show it is harmless. Again and again the women are told the paint is safe. Then they begin to fall ill in ways no doctor can explain, and the book follows them as they try to find out why, and what their employers knew.
Free Battle of the Books questions for The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women
SPOILERSEvery one of these has the same answer, and that is the point. In a real battle the question is read aloud with a dozen other books in play, and students have a few seconds to place it. Here is what a battle might ask about The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women. Use them as a quiz, a trivia round, or BOTB practice.
Where in the book they come from
- Early in the book
In what book does a young worker wear her first high heels home to defy her stepfather?
✓ Answer
The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women by Kate Moore
Marie Becker's stern stepfather took the wages she earned at Radium Dial, so one payday she went straight to the shoe store and bought her very first pair of high heels. She told the clerk not to wrap them and walked out wearing them, because she knew there was nothing her stepfather could do once she wore them home.
- First half
In what book does a county physician do his morning exercises to loud Scots bagpipe music?
✓ Answer
The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women by Kate Moore
Dr. Harrison Martland, who became the Essex County physician in 1925, was a colorful character who worked in his shirtsleeves, drove open-top automobiles, and loved Sherlock Holmes. Every morning he did his exercises to loud phonograph music of Scots bagpipes.
- First half
In what book has a quiet suitor's grandfather paid for one of his church's stained-glass windows?
✓ Answer
The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women by Kate Moore
Tom Donohue, the quiet young man who caught Catherine Wolfe's eye at church, came from an Irish-immigrant farm family and had once thought of becoming a priest. His grandfather had paid for one of the stained-glass windows at St. Columba when the church was built.
- Second half
In what book does a music lover spend her windfall on a piano and a radio?
✓ Answer
The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women by Kate Moore
With her share of the 1928 settlement, Edna Hussman, who has always loved music, buys a piano and a radio. Many of the women buy automobiles so they can get around more easily, and they also invest in building and loan shares.
- Second half
In what book does a woman joke about getting out of her sickbed to go vote?
✓ Answer
The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women by Kate Moore
Visiting Quinta McDonald in the hospital in the fall of 1929, Grace Fryer tells the waiting reporters she no longer always wears her back brace. Doctors have told her she has great resistance, and she jokes she had enough to get up and vote for Hoover when she was supposed to be sick in bed.
- Near the end
In what book does a grandmother with only one arm tie a jump rope to a chain-link fence?
✓ Answer
The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women by Kate Moore
Charlotte Purcell lives to be eighty-two and is adored by her grandchildren. When her granddaughter Jan asks her to teach her to jump rope, Charlotte ties the rope to a chain-link fence and shows her how with one arm.
