Kate Moore > Quotes

“The cynical would say there was only one reason a high-profile specialist finally took up the cause. On June 7, 1925, the first male employee of the United States Radium Corporation died.”
― Kate Moore, The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women

“And Grace Fryer was never forgotten. She is still remembered now—you are still remembering her now. As a dial-painter, she glowed gloriously from the radium powder; but as a woman, she shines through history with an even brighter glory: stronger than the bones that broke inside her body; more powerful than the radium that killed her or the company that shamelessly lied through its teeth; living longer than she ever did on earth, because she now lives on in the hearts and memories of those who know her only from her story.

Grace Fryer: the girl who fought on when all hope seemed gone; the woman who stood up for what was right, even as her world fell apart. Grace Fryer, who inspired so many to stand up for themselves.”
― Kate Moore, The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women

“Radium, they noted, had a “similar chemical nature” to calcium. Thus radium “if absorbed, might have a preference for bone as a final point of fixation.” Radium was what one might call a boneseeker, just like calcium; and the human body is programmed to deliver calcium straight to the bones to make them stronger… Essentially, radium had masked itself as calcium and, fooled, the girls’ bodies had deposited it inside their bones. Radium was a silent stalker, hiding behind that mask, using its disguise to burrow deep into the women’s jaws and teeth.”
― Kate Moore, The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women

“In the end, this is a book about power. Who wields it. Who owns it. And the methods they use. And above all, it's about fighting back.”
― Kate Moore, The Woman They Could Not Silence: One Woman, Her Incredible Fight for Freedom, and the Men Who Tried to Make Her Disappear

“A peace based on injustice…is a treacherous sleep whose waking is death. Your honor lies in waking out of it.”
― Kate Moore, The Woman They Could Not Silence

“We’ve got humane societies for dogs and cats, but they won’t do anything for human beings,” he spat out. “These women have souls.”
― Kate Moore, The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women

“doctors were policing women who stepped outside society’s strictly defined gender spheres—work and intellect for men, home and children for women—in what could be described as a “medicalization of female behavior.”
― Kate Moore, The Woman They Could Not Silence

“Unruly women are always witches, no matter what century we’re in.”
― Kate Moore, The Woman They Could Not Silence

“My body means nothing but pain to me,” Grace revealed, “and it might mean longer life or relief to the others, if science had it. It’s all I have to give.”
― Kate Moore, The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women

“Lip… Dip… Paint.”
― Kate Moore, The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women

“Woman is too volatile and spiritual a being to be kept down by mere brute force,”
― Kate Moore, The Woman They Could Not Silence

“It's a book that is set over 160 year ago. A lot has changed. A lot hasn't. We are only just beginning to appreciate exactly how a person's powerlessness may lead to struggles with their mental health. With our understanding, statics showing higher rates of mental illness in women, people of color and other disenfranchised groups become translated into truth. NOT a biological deficiency as doctors first thought. But a cultural creation that, if wanted to, we could do something about.”
― Kate Moore, The Woman They Could Not Silence: One Woman, Her Incredible Fight for Freedom, and the Men Who Tried to Make Her Disappear

“Insane asylum - a place where insanity is made.”
― Kate Moore, The Woman They Could Not Silence: One Woman, Her Incredible Fight for Freedom, and the Men Who Tried to Make Her Disappear

“Radium, he determined, was dangerous. It was just that nobody told the girls…”
― Kate Moore, The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women

“It is an offense against Morals and Humanity,” he concluded, “and, just incidentally, against the law.”
― Kate Moore, The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women

“What was the first case that you heard of?” asked Berry. “I don’t remember the name,” replied Roeder coldly. The dial-painters weren’t important enough for him to recall such insignificant details.”
― Kate Moore, The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women

“The radium girls,” the governor announced, “deserve the utmost respect and admiration…because they battled a dishonest company, an indifferent industry, dismissive courts and the medical community in the face of certain death. I hereby proclaim September 2, 2011, as Radium Girls Day in Illinois, in recognition of the tremendous perseverance, dedication, and sense of justice the radium girls exhibited in their fight.”
― Kate Moore, The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women

“The girls shone “like the watches did in the darkroom,” as though they themselves were timepieces, counting down the seconds as they passed. They glowed like ghosts as they walked home through the streets of Orange.”
― Kate Moore

“Elizabeth’s mind spun from what he told her. Under the laws of the United States at that time, a man’s wife was his property: Theophilus could do as he wished. She later wrote in bleak despair, “I…have married away all the freedom I ever had in America”
― Kate Moore, The Woman They Could Not Silence

“The Illinois law in fact explicitly stated that married women could be admitted “without the evidence of insanity…required in other cases.”
― Kate Moore, The Woman They Could Not Silence

“submission is no virtue.”
― Kate Moore, The Woman They Could Not Silence

“Yet the flip side of the coin was all the positive literature about radium. As early as 1914, specialists knew that radium could deposit in the bones of radium users and that it caused changes in their blood. These blood changes, however, were interpreted as a good thing—the radium appeared to stimulate the bone marrow to produce extra red blood cells. Deposited inside the body, radium was the gift that kept on giving. But if you looked a little closer at all those positive publications, there was a common denominator: the researchers, on the whole, worked for radium firms. As radium was such a rare and mysterious element, its commercial exploiters in fact controlled, to an almost monopolizing extent, its image and most of the knowledge about it. Many firms had their own radium-themed journals, which were distributed free to doctors, all full of optimistic research. The firms that profited from radium medicine were the primary producers and publishers of the positive literature.”
― Kate Moore, The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women

“That class of men who wish to rule woman, seem intent on destroying her reason.”
― Kate Moore, The Woman They Could Not Silence

“Gods can be kind. Loving. Benevolent. Yet as the playwright George Bernard Shaw once wrote, “The gods of old are constantly demanding human sacrifices.”
― Kate Moore, The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women

“Why should I be so afflicted?” she would later ask. “I have never harmed a living thing. What have I done to be so punished?”
― Kate Moore, The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women

“Wars are hungry machines—and the more you feed them, the more they consume.”
― Kate Moore, The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women

“Just think!” Elizabeth later exclaimed. “Forty men and women clubbed together to get me imprisoned just because I chose to think my own thoughts, and speak my own words!”
― Kate Moore, The Woman They Could Not Silence

“Lip-pointing had been stopped in late 1923; Josephine Smith, the forelady, revealed: “When [the company] warning was given about pointing brushes in [our] mouths, it was explained to the girls [that] this was because the acid in the mouth spoiled the adhesive.”
― Kate Moore, The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women

“Sarah wasn’t even in her grave before her former company was denying it was to blame.”
― Kate Moore, The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women

“If these sufferers can bear to feel it, I can and will bear to see it…for if I do not see these things, I cannot testify that I did. So I will even look on,”
― Kate Moore, The Woman They Could Not Silence