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Old 05-25-2018, 10:13 AM   #83
gmw
cacoethes scribendi
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So I finished. (It's a long time since it took me this long to read anything. It wasn't all the book's fault, work has been very heavy.) ... I hope the following might shed some light on my earlier reactions.

I may be naive, but I believe there are very few people in the world that would knowingly put anyone through what these women went through, and because that seems so unlikely to me, I seek other explanations - but this book is the wrong place to find them, the author is too busy using deliberately emotive language that obscures anything more subtle.

I distrust easy answers. The whole evil corporation run by mean-spirited bean-counters thing is a great device for fiction, but it's a cop-out here. And I think it cheapens what these women achieved.

That there is more to it than evil corporations can be seen in the reactions of the other people in Ottawa, and in the difficulties all the women had in obtaining legal representation, and in problems getting a fair hearing from government departments, and in the fickle support of the newspapers. I am not claiming the companies were represented by angels, but to really understand what happened you have to understand more of the context than is made clear in this book.

You can extract some hints at the larger perspective as the book comes to a close. For example:

Quote:
Catherine's triumph in court, thirteen years later [after the first attempt], was one of the first cases in which an employer was made responsible for the health of its employees.
This is what the book seems to push to one side in its emphasis on suffering angels and corporate villains. This time was a turning point in industrial relations. These women were dealing with a situation very much out of the ordinary. Radiation was out of the ordinary (the book glossed over, until the epilogue, how important these events were to our understanding of radiation). The amounts involved were out of the ordinary (< 30grams in the WWI, what tiny fraction of that entered the girls' bodies?) The time-frame was out of the ordinary (years between infliction and effect). This was new science in a new world after the first world world war when women were playing a larger part in so many things. In short, the circumstances were a mess, but the author seems intent on making it childishly simple.

The villainy of Radium Dial grew out of the earlier situation, a time when it was arguable that they didn't know better, but they kept making choices that only made it harder and harder for them to ever capitulate and admit mistakes. In some respects it was the extremity that Radium Dial went to that made the ultimate result such a clear marker in history. We see evidence of this from its contrast to the Newark case with Grace Fryer and her friends; a noble attempt by those girls, but the USRC deliberately avoided making it a landmark legal decision.

But I think that in presenting the radium companies in the way she does, Moore reduces the impact of what was achieved by these women. They were not just fighting against corporate exploitation by specific companies, they were (part of) changing society itself. They helped to change the way America saw its corporate and social responsibilities. This was big, much bigger than a handful of girls against a company, and I felt that Moore's deliberately emotive recital obscured that.

Of course the event doesn't stand alone in history, and this outsider might suggest that America still has a lot to learn about social responsibilities, like separating aid-giving from fault-finding. If that had been possible back then, then Grace Fryer's case may have been able to go through to become the landmark it should have been, and so saved the Ottawa girls some of their suffering and troubles (it was too late to prevent it entirely).

Or maybe it wouldn't have made a difference. People can be very fickle in their sympathies. It may be that only finding the girls in such dire straits allowed them to garner the popular support needed to win their cases. Do we as a society really insist on there being desperately suffering victims and absolutely despicable villains before we will instigate change? That's the sort of question that makes history interesting to me, but it's not the sort of question this book considers. Although, once we get to the epilogue, Moore does seem to suggest that the suffering was necessary: "their suffering would provide 'vital insight'". Perhaps Moore is more realistic than I am, but it's not a conclusion I'm comfortable with. I'd like to believe it was the information gained, not the suffering endured, that led to our advancement.

And despite the acknowledgements that Moore makes in her epilogue, explaining how many lives have been saved by what these girls went through, she still manages to offer this direct contradiction: "Radium had been known to be harmful since 1901. Every death since was unnecessary." Is this ignorance, poor editing, or is the author being disingenuous? After all the work she put into this book, and there was obviously a great deal of work, does she still not understand? Someone was always destined to find out the hard way. If this book wasn't inside an ereader I would have thrown it across the room. (One is tempted to suggest that if Moore could not understand it with a century of hindsight, is it any wonder the company executives of the time remained ignorant in their own way.)


Whatever we have or have not learned since, the women deserve recognition for what they achieved, and sympathy for what they were forced go through. The book by Kate Moore, however, I found disappointing and annoying, and I only finished it because of this discussion.

(I do ramble on a lot ... sorry about that.)
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