The author does a great job balancing the many court proceedings, reports, and individual profiles of those involved with compelling personal stories of the brave women who suffered the most. Court cases dragged on for years, plagued by bureaucracy and the powerful corporations’ determination to cover up any responsibility they had in the girls’ illness. Moore also explores the story of the women who worked at the Radium Dial Company in Ottawa, IL. Doctors were mystified at their condition, and their employers refused to take responsibility, even discrediting the characters of the girls involved. Moore offers a heartbreaking account of the pain and suffering many of the “radium girls” experienced. This element was still relatively new, and scientists were unaware of how dangerous it was. They painted watch dials with glow-in-the-dark paint made with radium. In 1917, the same year the United States entered World War I, dozens of young women, many of them teenagers from working-class families, took up positions at the Radium Luminous Materials Corporation in Newark, NJ. But while Packard was an abolitionist, she also held deeply racist views, writing in one of her many political pamphlets, "It is my candid opinion, that no Southern slave ever suffered more spiritual agony than I have suffered as I am more developed in my moral and spiritual nature than they are, therefore more capable of suffering." Moore never quotes these lines, or explores Packard's belief that she was more spiritually elevated than the enslaved people she relied on so often as metaphors for her own condition.Gr 7 Up–This dense, meticulously researched book covers the courageous determination of young women who unknowingly poisoned themselves while doing their job. Moore, too, often juxtaposes the two movements, tying breakthroughs in Packard's case with particular battles or turning points in the war. Packard's time in the asylum overlapped with the American Civil War, and she drew freely on the struggle for emancipation in her own writings. A kind of radiantly certain, almost Antigone-like figure, she thought she was doing God's work.īut the book's strangest and biggest omission is the subject of slavery. Packard's campaign was a feminist one, yes, but she also saw it as very much a Christian one. Moore, the author of The Radium Girls, is a clear writer but prone to overreliance on metaphor, and painfully eager to make sure we never miss the point ("Quietly, she moved about the house.footsteps as muffled as a woman's gagged voice.")Ī particular oversight is Packard's religious views, which are never fully explained or explored, despite being the primary justification for her incarceration. But because it is quoted often without chronology or context, it is hard to see her intellectual development, the beginnings of her feminist stirrings, and the evolution of her relationship with her husband. Packard's writing, quoted generously, is the best part of the book - resolute, warm, both soulful and practical. One Illinois woman she read about was lobotomized in 1955 without any diagnosis aside from being "unfriendly" and "disagreeable." But in Packard, Moore found an ideal hero, one with a "spirit as wide as her skirt" who not only fought the system but won. "'Crazy' was a cul-de-sac, a one-way street that only ever ended with one outcome," she writes. But most of the stories she read were painfully bleak. In an author's note, Moore writes that she wanted to look at the ways that women have been dismissed as "crazy" throughout history. Kate Moore's The Woman They Could Not Silence: One Woman, Her Incredible Fight for Freedom, and the Men Who Tried to Make Her Disappear is the story of Packard's fascinating lifelong fight. Incarcerated in the asylum for three years, she would go on to write bestselling books chronicling her experience and would campaign successfully against laws that allowed husbands to lock up their wives without trial. Hence the group of men climbing through the broken window, and carrying her, immobile, to the train that would take her on to the Jacksonville Insane Asylum. Disturbed by these, and the idea that Elizabeth was "becoming insane on the subject of women's rights," as he later wrote, Theophilius decided to have his wife committed to an asylum. But she and her husband Theophilius, a preacher, had begun having theological arguments. One day in the summer of 1860, an Illinois woman named Elizabeth Packard watched as an ax crashed through her bedroom window.Ī wife and mother, her life had previously been relatively quiet, centered on home and church. The Woman They Could Not Silence: One Woman, Her Incredible Fight for Freedom, and the Men Who Tried to Make Her Disappear, by Kate Moore
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