Interview with Kate Moore, author of 'The Radium Girls' and 'The Woman They Could Not Silence'

Hello Darling Readers, 

It is my distinct pleasure and honour to give you an Author Q&A (haven't done one of these in a while!) - for someone I most admire, and whose books I am absolutely *obsessed* with. 

The one. The only. Kate Moore - author of The Radium Girls and The Woman They Could Not Silence! 

** 

Q: You've written fifteen books across various genres, so you've clearly developed a very good instinct for story in this industry. But what was it about your award-winning international bestseller, The Radium Girls, that felt different when you thought of it? Could you tell even at the point of the first burst of idea; that it would be a special one, and go off on the rocket-ship trajectory it did? 

I genuinely didn’t anticipate the reaction that The Radium Girls has received. What was different about this story from my other books, however, was the passion with which I pursued the project and, ultimately, with which I wrote the book. At the time I stumbled on the radium girls’ story – which I did through directing a play about them – I’d been a freelance editor and writer for about six months. I was busy ghostwriting other people’s memoirs – usually, these were stories of courageously fighting for justice, which actually parallels my interpretation of the radium girls’ experiences perfectly – and working on very commercial projects, such as cat books and humour titles. I had never written a history book before. But I felt driven to tell the women’s story and I think that passion marked it out as different for me, even though I didn’t necessarily anticipate its subsequent success. 

Q: I love Radium Girls *so much* - I have the hardback, paperback, and Young Reader's edition and have re-read it three times in three years. I adore it! So I've got to know; are there plans for it to be adapted? It's begging to be a Chernobyl-esque HBO series, if you ask me! 

Oh my goodness, thank you so much for your love for the women and their story! I can say that there is interest from Hollywood and things seem to be going well, but if I’ve learned anything about dramatic adaptations of books over the past few years, it’s that it takes forever for anything concrete to happen. So, I’m keeping my fingers crossed – but not holding my breath! All I can say is watch this space.

***

Q: How did you come across the muse and historic-figure for your next investigations and new book, Elizabeth Packard? When did you first 'meet' her? 

Finding Elizabeth’s story was a topsy-turvy situation because I found the topic I wanted to write about before I found my story’s actual heroine. The genesis of The Woman They Could Not Silence occurred in the fall of 2017, amid in the fire of the #MeToo movement. What struck me about that empowering time was not that women were speaking out, but that – finally – we were being listened to and, crucially, believed. It got me thinking about how women have been silenced and discredited in the past – namely, through the claim we’re crazy. And that’s what I wanted to write about – the medicalisation of female behaviour, and the way perfectly sane women are dismissed as mad simply for standing up for themselves. 

Having decided on the topic, I went searching for a story – because I am at heart a storyteller, even though I write non-fiction. I hoped to find a woman from history whose real-life experiences could showcase these issues, which still resonate today. I fell down a rabbit warren of internet searches about women and madness, and on 15 January 2018, in a University of Wisconsin essay that I found online, in a single paragraph four pages in, I first read about Elizabeth Packard. That first clue was enough for me to dig deeper, and once I realized how special Elizabeth was – how resilient, how fearless, how inspirational – and how dramatic her story, I knew she was “The One”: the woman I would write about next. 

Q: I can see strong themes and connections between The Radium Girls and The Woman They Could Not Silence - but I'd love to know for you personally, what tethers all your work in this nonfiction space? How would you categorise those threads? And are you constantly looking for new events and figures to keep exploring in your work? 

I agree there are lots of parallels! For me, it’s actually several elements. The most obvious would be inspiring women fighting for justice, the indisputable drama of their stories, and the forgotten nature of their achievements, but I think there are also parallels in the shocking science history, in gothic horror, and in the way these historic events still resonate today. I think what tethers a lot of my work is the idea of helping people silenced through injustice to have a voice again. And I am always looking for new events and figures to keep exploring in my work – though it’s easier said than done to find the right topic, especially given the intimate narratives I aspire to write, which are packed full of first-person accounts, so you can hear from the people at the heart of these stories themselves.

***

Q: How do you go about just ... beginning? Once you've hit on a topic (person or historic event) - what's your first point of order in researching and just *starting*? First port of call? 

The very first port of call is the internet, which is probably not surprising in this day and age. In the very early stages of a project, you not only want to know the bones of the story (at least as people currently understand them to be – sometimes deeper research reveals inaccuracies!) but also whether people have written on the topic before (sometimes, that can be the nail in the coffin if a narrative non-fiction account already exists). The second stage for me is always research, research, and yet more research. That means visiting special collections, libraries and museums, conducting interviews with key figures and their families, travelling to key locations, and reading other books on related topics (including scouring their bibliographies for yet more research inspiration…). For me, it’s essential to conduct all my research for a book before I write a single word of the manuscript. 

Q: I'm so interested in narrative nonfiction, and the way the form has been elevated in recent years - I'm curious to know as author and researcher, what are the "rules" of nonfiction that you stick to, and what have you enjoyed playing around with in a more artistic sense? (I know some nonfiction authors are constantly tackling the 'what were they thinking' problem in non-fiction; inferring what these "characters" based on real-people would have felt in a moment, etc.) 

I always aim to stay tethered to the facts as my sources show them to be. In terms of the “what were they thinking?” problem, I’ve been blessed that with both my history books to date, I had a wealth of first-person material to draw on, so I knew exactly what my “characters” were thinking and feeling as they left a record behind. There are of course always holes in research and sources where you don’t know exactly what happened. My solution in these situations is usually to make it clear to the reader that there is a question, but to plant seeds of what might have been so the reader still sees that situation in their mind’s eye. For example, when Elizabeth Packard confronts Dr. McFarland at one stage, she’s uncharacteristically coy in her account of the meeting about what actually happened at the climax of their impassioned discussion. In the book, I therefore wrote about this moment as follows: 

She observed with some surprise, “his feelings burst their confinement.”

Did he slam the table? Stand up with force? Grab at her elbows to shake her roughly? We do not know; she did not say. It could have been a glare or a grasp or a guttural roar: all we know is that, with strong feeling, he finally reacted to her words.

In terms of what I enjoy playing around with artistically, my love is storytelling, so I love two things in particular – 1/ creating and setting scenes based on extensive research – describing the click of Elizabeth’s boots on the stone steps of the asylum, for example, and the way that intimidating building is lit by the glow of gas-lights as she approaches it in the dusky twilight – and 2/ trying to prompt an emotional response in the reader to the real events I’m describing. 

Q: I imagine in both your books, hefty as they are!, there's still a lot that gets chucked out in the edits. So what are two facts or quirky findings you had in both Radium and Could Not Silence that you regret had to be cut? 

Oh, *so* much goes in the edits! I’m terrible for overdelivering and having to cut back afterwards. Hmm, two facts or quirky findings that had to go… For The Radium Girls, a fact from early on in the book that I had to cut was that, at that time, 75% of teenage girls worked for wages and they made up the majority of women in the workplace (older women tended to be married with children, and they therefore stayed in the home). You might also be interested to know that the Parisian laboratory in which the Curies discovered radium was so ramshackle it was described as “a cross between a horse stable and a potato cellar.” In The Woman They Could Not Silence, I had to cut a paragraph about the history of hydrotherapy (water therapy) to treat mental illness. “Patients were…blasted with high-powered hoses, wrapped in wet sheets, and submerged for hours in tubs of cold water,” I wrote of this historic treatment. “It was not a new therapy: one eighteenth-century doctor developed a treatment—conceived to treat wives who would not sleep with their husbands—in which the women were stripped, blindfolded and tied to a chair, before being showered for up to 90 minutes with incredible quantities of water (in one case, 15 tonnes).”

Q: Any helpful 'how-to' books, podcasts, Ted Talks etc. that you encountered and helped you in your creative process?

I’d highly recommend The Exploress podcast (which is actually an Australian podcast!), which takes you on a fully immersive time-travelling journey through women’s history. I found several of her pieces super helpful and fascinating. Visit www.theexploresspodcast.com

Q: What are you reading and loving right now?

I just finished historical novelist Marie Benedict’s latest book, Her Hidden Genius, which is about the scientist Rosalind Franklin. It’s due out in January 2022 and I think readers are going to devour it. 

Q: What's next, and when can we expect to see it on bookshelves?!

I’m currently tackling the “what’s next?” question and as of yet haven’t settled on an answer! Whatever it ends up being, it will likely take me several years to research and write… so maybe set your calendar for 2025 (or thereabouts!).

'The Woman They Could Not Silence: Elizabeth Packard’s incredible fight for freedom, and the men who tried to make her disappear,’ by Kate Moore

Received from the Publisher 

 

From the BLURB: 

From the internationally bestselling author of The Radium Girls comes a dark but ultimately uplifting tale of a woman whose incredible journey still resonates today. 

Elizabeth Packard was an ordinary Victorian housewife and mother of six. That was, until the first Woman’s Rights Convention was held in 1848, inspiring Elizabeth and many other women to dream of greater freedoms. She began voicing her opinions on politics and religion — opinions that her husband did not share. Incensed and deeply threatened by her growing independence, he had her declared 'slightly insane' and committed to an asylum. 

Inside the Illinois State Hospital, Elizabeth found many other perfectly lucid women who, like her, had been betrayed by their husbands and incarcerated for daring to have a voice. But just because you are sane, doesn’t mean that you can escape a madhouse … 

Fighting the stigma of her gender and her supposed madness, Elizabeth embarked on a ceaseless quest for justice. It not only challenged the medical science of the day and saved untold others from suffering her fate, it ultimately led to a giant leap forward in human rights the world over.

*** 

'The Woman They Could Not Silence: Elizabeth Packard’s incredible fight for freedom, and the men who tried to make her disappear,’ is the latest book from London-based author Kate Moore, and her second non-fiction book after the bestselling and award-winning ‘The Radium Girls.’ 

Is it strange to read a book about 19th-century gender-based injustices and think of Britney Spears crossed with anti-lockdown rhetoric? Well. I can’t help it. From the author’s note the line is clear from the first; ‘This is not a book about mental health, but about how it can be used as a weapon.’ And indeed when the plight of Britney Spears’ has thrown a harsh light on the problem of conservatorships and sparked wider examination of them as a Disability Rights issue too. One of the most eloquently-put arguments against them that I read, came from the Ronan Farrow and Jia Tolentino New Yorker article; ‘“Our mistakes make us who we are, and teach us who we can be,” Martinis said. “Without bad choices, we can’t be wholly human. And with the best of intentions, we say to people with disabilities: we’ll keep you from ever making a mistake.”’

An overlapping venn-diagram has been the anti-lockdown rhetoric aimed at the most locked-down city in the world, mine – Melbourne. ‘Shadow Pandemic Vic’ put forth the ‘damaging to mental health and rise in suicide rates,’ argument for ending lockdowns sprinkled, with a “but what about the children?!” Helen Lovejoy proclamation. Never mind that many on the Internet were able to make very clear and compelling links between the ‘Shadow Pandemic’ “founders” the Liberal Party, suggesting political astro-turfing. While also showing that annual suicide data did not support the claims either. While many more pointed out that the risk of catching and spreading Covid-19 provided a much harder reality of hurt for young children especially; ‘Hidden Pandemic’: 1 Million Children Worldwide Lost A Parent To Covid, Study Finds.

It’s fascinating then, to come to Kate Moore’s latest book that begins in 1860 Illinois and find so many tendrils and talking-points to the here and now. But this initial comparison of weaponizing mental health, wasn’t the only one I made while reading … indeed; the book is an eerie shout into the post with echoes in the here and now, an important and spine-tingling book for the parallels that still exist. 

It’s the story of Elizabeth Packard, married to a preacher and content in a life and marriage that centred around home and church … until the woman's rights movement and crusade for the right to vote sweeps through America and takes hold of Elizabeth’s passions. Suddenly she and her husband Theophilius are having theological and philosophical arguments until eventually he decides to have his wife committed to an asylum, on grounds of insanity.  

What comes next is the harrowing detailing of her three-year incarceration, and a wider journey into the history of women being dismissed and abused on grounds of their own insanity. This is especially fascinating because I thought I knew so much of this via the story of pioneering journalist Nellie Bly, who checked herself into an asylum in 1887 and went on to detail the brutalising treatment and unethical practices that led to reforms of such institutions, via her journalism. But, as Moore explores, Elizabeth Packard upon release would go on to write her own books chronicling her experiences and beginning to shine a light on the practices and abuses that the likes of Bly would eventually turn their own investigations to.

This is by no means an easy book to read. But I enjoyed it so thoroughly, because I simply adore Kate Moore’s writing. I think it’s a known-fact at this point that ‘The Radium Girls’ remains one of my all-time favourite books and reading experiences I’ve ever had. I also now own it in paperback, hardback and young reader’s edition … and while ‘'The Woman They Could Not Silence’ doesn’t quite eclipse my adoration for ‘Radium Girls,’ it comes damn close in giving me a similar fire-in-my-belly reading experience and a real urge to get up on a pulpit and hand Kate Moore’s books out to all who’ll hear me preach her brilliance. 

5/5 

'The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women' by Kate Moore

I heard about UK author Kate Moore’s 2017 book ‘The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women’ because it won the prestigious Goodreads Choice Award for History & Biography. A quick glance at the blurb (and there’s a very condensed version of the story from Buzzfeed) and I was intrigued by this chapter of history, that does indeed sound like an episode of ‘Stuff You Missed in History Class’. 

I am not a big non-fiction reader, however – least of all of books such as this, that run to 480-pages. But I decided to give this one a go, and I am so glad I did. This is now – quite possibly – my favourite read of 2017. An infuriating but necessary read that feels like the most apt and thoughtful way to send-off 2017. The year that a serial sexual abuser was inducted into the White House, #MeToo rang out across the world and there’s a sense that many people are waking up to injustice.

Moore’s book, in many ways, highlights how far we’ve come – but also how long we’ve been fighting.

In 1898, Marie (and Pierre) Curie developed the theory of radioactivity and techniques for isolating radioactive isotopes, and the discovery of two elements, polonium and radium. In 1901 when ‘The Radium Girls’ opens its prologue chapter, French physicist Henri Becquerel is transporting a glass vial of radium to London in his waistcoat pocket – where he will eventually discover an inflammation of the skin, right where the vial was pressing. By then it’s too late however, for in a Paris hospital radium has been successfully used to treat a case of lupus … thus, its proclamation as a wonder-element would begin and radium therapy (particularly in the fight against cancer) would herald it as an elixir of Biblical proportions.

The book then leaps to 1917, and will by the end take readers through to 1938 … and even beyond, in a manner of speaking. Its focus, however, is on the booming wartime and then post-war business of ‘radium dials’ – watches and clocks with the numbers and hands painted in radioluminescent paint, so they’d glow green in the dark. These dials were painted by ‘Radium Girls’ – an entirely female workforce of young women (some even pre-teen) who signed up to help the war-effort, and then later found prosperity in one of the last booming businesses to survive the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and Great Depression … these women hand-painted the dials with fine brushes – brushes they were instructed to press between their lips to keep the fine point, then dip in radium, paint the dials, and repeat the process – lip, dip, paint – through to the companies producing millions of clocks and watches a year. The story initially focuses on the first business – United States Radium Corporation – based in New Jersey, but eventually swings to the Radium Dial Company built in Ottawa, Illinois a few years later.

These Radium Girls – who would daily become covered in the radioluminescent paint as they sat working diligently at their work-stations – were nicknamed “ghost girls” for the way they glowed in the dark, eerie and beautiful.

These women had no cause for concern in ingesting the radium paint – for the world had fully embraced radium as a wonder-cure and catchall product. It was used in toothpaste, beauty products, and drinking coolers – there was even "Radium Brand Creamery Butter” advertised (though because of its expense, it’s hardly likely all of these products contained traces of radium – still) it was a booming business. Some may even say, it was among the first “wellness industries” created. Furthermore – the Radium Girls, upon induction to their dial-paining work – would watch their forewoman scoop up a glob of the radium paint with a spatula and lick it off, to show how harmless it was (it could – they were told – even be considered a free healthcare treatment!). Some companies even sold granules of used radium paint to schools and crèches – for use in their sandpits, since it had the same consistency.

But within a few short years, something odd begins happening to the dial-painting workforce of women. Their teeth start falling out, and their gums don’t heal, but ulcer. Eventually their jaws start loosening, and then disintegrating – in one case; a dentist is able to lift out a honeycombed jaw from the mouth of a girl with no instruments but his bare hands. Doctors and dentists are perplexed – they suspect “phossy jaw”, first discovered as a common ailment of the match-stick industry, and use of white phosphorus. But they can find no evidence of the women coming into contact with such a substance. Syphilis is then assumed, in at least one patient who eventually dies from her injuries – particularly as she was a woman living alone, and all that that implies.

But then other women start complaining of pain in their legs, arms, backs – in their very bones and joints. The medical industry is completely perplexed – especially as the only thing connecting these women is their work at the Radium Corporation, and – as everybody knows – radium is perfectly harmless. There is no such thing as radium “poisoning”. Even when they started dying, one by one, radium was slow to be recognised as their cause.

The story unfolds – and over the course of 400+ pages we meet the men and women who became both champions and villains in this saga. We see the role unions and humble workers played as sleuths, piecing together a medical puzzle and corporate cover-up. Doctors in the pockets of radium companies, willing to outright lie and steal. Radium bosses, who knew the dangers and preferred to keep their big profit-margins than save lives. A young, inexperienced attorney willing to take on a civil lawsuit, and become champion for these women. And the women themselves, who refused to go quietly – even as they knew they were dying and would likely reap no benefits from their lawsuits, but who wanted these companies to be held accountable. Women who wanted to make sure no others would suffer as they now were.

I’m reminded of the true-crime book ‘In Cold Blood’, and criticism Truman Capote had to weather when he pioneered the nonfiction genre into the mainstream. The main one being from critics who said it wouldn’t sell, because readers knew how the book would end – with the execution of convicted killers, Richard "Dick" Hickock and Perry Smith. Still, to read ‘In Cold Blood’ is to read a potboiler that’s no less thrilling and heartbreaking for piecing together the events that lead and follow tragedy, and knowing how it will all conclude. I’d say the same of Kate Moore’s ‘The Radium Girls’ – when the foregone conclusion for modern audiences is to read with slack-jawed incredulity at the ways the 19^th century carelessly handled (what we now know to be) one of the most dangerous substances on the planet.

At the end of the day, ‘The Radium Girls’ perhaps works so well because Moore still presents the story as a procedural. She knows full well that readers know who the killer is, and the cover-up that won’t stay buried. But she still takes us through its paces, letting the tragedy unfurl in “real time”. In this too, I’m reminded of one of the greatest films of the last ten years (in my opinion), the likewise investigative procedural 2015 film, ‘Spotlight’ – about how the Boston Globe uncovered the decades-long history of church sexual abuse in their city, but would eventually lead to a worldwide investigation. This story is also positioned, knowing that their audience are aware of who the villains are – but works to show how the puzzle was pieced together, who the players were.

At first I wondered why this story hadn’t been adapted for film or television before. Indeed, parts of it had such a pace and substance that echoed movies like ‘Silkwood’, ‘Erin Brockovich’, and ‘Norma Rae’. And not just for those being about women against industrial and capitalist regimes – but for being about poor people who are expendable in the eyes of corporations. Why didn’t I know of the Radium Girls story beforehand – especially when it’s so universal? Not just about American labour reform, but really the story of how the world came to truly understand one of the most revolutionary discoveries of the 19^th century – radium. But as the book goes on – broken down into three parts, spanning from 1917 to 1938 – it becomes apparent why this story, however compelling, would be difficult to dramatise.

The players keep changing. Heroes emerge, only to die. Pointlessly, painfully, and young (most in their early-20’s) – no matter how heroically they faced their end, there is no cure for radium poisoning, especially when the substance has a shelf-life of 1600-years.

I can’t quite recall, but I think in this book Moore mentions at least 50 women specifically – and of those, about 25 take the stage in some capacity to pull our focus. Certainly it feels like there are two heroes who shine slightly brighter – Grace Fryer and Catherine Wolfe Donohue – for the leadership roles they took on amongst their group of poisoned friends, leading class-action lawsuits and refusing to back-down in the face of insurmountable odds. But these women (it’s no spoiler to say) do die. They leave behind a powerful legacy, but they die tragically nonetheless.

The timeline also splits between the New Jersey case against the United States Radium Corporation, and Ottawa’s Radium Dial Company. For this reason, I think a television series would be the best format for an adaptation (and I certainly hope there is one) – although I could see a movie taking inspiration from a film like 2002’s The Hours.  

Then there’s the fact that some of the events seem too unreal and abhorrent to be believed. But they’re true. Like a doctor in the pocket of Radium Dial stealing bones of a deceased girl at autopsy, so they couldn’t be tested for radium. Or a husband of one of the afflicted women, getting into fisticuffs in the middle of the street with her old manager – who still refused to admit any wrongdoing, even when one of his former employees came to him after having her arm amputated due to a radium-caused sarcoma on her elbow.

This year – 2017 and the year of #MeToo – was an interesting and infuriating one in which to read the book. A book in which nobody initially believed women. They were gaslighted – deliberated and cruelly – and told to disbelieve their own bodies, their own decay. Doctors lied to them, big corporations became frustrated when they didn’t die quick enough. Towns turned against them – particularly during the Great Depression – when the women were seen to be troublemakers, hell-bent on taking jobs away from their struggling towns.

After all, Radium Dial had long been a valued employer. With the country in the middle of its worst-even economic depression – what some were now calling the Great Depression – communities were even more protective of the firms that could give them work and wages. The women found they were disbelieved, ignored, and even shunned when they spoke out about their ailments and the cause.

Sound familiar?

I was reminded of something the author Gillian Flynn wrote, for TIME Magazine that stuck with me – that gnaws at me. She wasn’t just talking about sexual abuse, but the whole goddamn system. The patriarchy and the powerful (one in the same) and their treatment, their views, of women – when she wrote;

I feel humiliated and angry. They hate us. That’s my immediate thought, with each new revelation: They hate us. And then, a more sick-making suspicion: They don’t care about us enough to hate us. We are simply a form of livestock.

That never feels truer than in this book – which shows just how expendable women were in the eyes of the corporations who killed them.

One may think that the story of ‘The Radium Girls’ is antiquated – look how far we’ve come, in understanding the rights of workers, and of holding big businesses accountable! But this story is still happening today – somewhere, somehow.

Look at the Grenfell Tower fire in June of this year – started by hazardous cladding that was installed to make a block of public housing flats in North Kensington more appealing to residents in wealthier surrounds. The Flint (Michigan) water crisis began in 2014, and is still unresolved – an entire town in the United States of America has been without clean drinking water for nearly five years now.

‘The Radium Girls’ was an important book for me to read – a story I am so grateful to now know about. But it is not a story that ends in 1938 (and not just because to this day the women’s bodies are projecting radioactivity from their graves). Rather – it’s a testimony to ongoing battles; to hold big businesses accountable (not give them bigger tax-breaks) and to never put profit before people. The legacy of these women is one of speaking truth to power. Which they did – with their dying breaths.

5/5

-->