When I was in law school, a professor of mine used to have an adage - "Learning to think like a lawyer isn't all that hard. Remembering to think like a human being again is the hard part." I liked the adage so much that when I became a professor myself, I passed it on to my students. I bring this little anecdote up because this book reminded me again of that dichotomy.
Lawyer thoughts:
I was frustrated by the pacing of the book. So much of the first half of the book focused on the "meet the girls" and then the "catalog of their physical horrors" that it almost became desensitizing. I never felt like I did more than briefly glimpse the women before they were dead. I thought more time might have been spent on the women who would be the eventual plaintiffs rather than the slap-dash anecdotes about so many of them.
I was very disappointed in the lack of exploring the actual legal issues. We got very little detail about the lawsuits themselves, the actual claims, etc. We also got a very short view of what roles the Department of Labor, the FDA, and the Public Health Service played in the state of the law before and after the cases. I understand that the women's testimony was the tear-jerking part of the narrative, but as for actually proving damages, it was only a tiny piece of the proof puzzle of the case.
I was also frustrated by the oversimplification of the roles of some of the "villains" of the case. Much was made of Flinn and his efforts to undermine the women's cases as was the abandonment of Harrison Martland, the medical examiner. Flinn would go on to spend years battling the medicinal use of radiation. Martland led a crusade against the radioactive tonic industry. Both men clearly came down on the wrong side of the women's stories, but painting them as paid-off corporate lackeys was just a little irksome to me.
Human thoughts:
Just how common was it for someone to die of their job in 1922?! The fact that employers did not actually have a legal duty not to allow their workers to be harmed by their work is not all that surprising. After all, the 1920s were not all that far removed from the industrial revolution and child labor. I suppose it is the general acceptance of death generally that I was not prepared for. So many women dying young and going unnoticed for so long.
While the story is compelling, I'm still not sure how much of an impact it had. In February, the Sidney Award for journalism was presented to a reporter who did a piece on how
deadly it is to be a private trash collector in New York City. The story reported that "Waste and recycling work is the fifth most fatal job in America — far more deadly than serving as a police officer or a firefighter. Loggers have the highest fatality rate, followed by fishing workers, aircraft pilots, and roofers." That got me to thinking - our industrial workers are still dying faster than people who get hazard pay to go to work. Just how much change has actually happened in labor law?
Concluding thoughts:
I will give the book a small pass for not delving into the legal issues in a more in-depth fashion as the author is a writer who
advertises ghost-writing memiors as one of her specialties. She is also English, and there are enough differences between our system of law that I can forgive the glossing over.
I wished there had been more than just the epilogue for follow-up. You I would like to know more about how this company "got away with it" until the 1970s. Who were the villains of enforcement then?
I feel the book was not evenly paced and did not make the best use of its subject, but I am still glad I read it.