Kate Moore
Kate Moore is a bestselling author and editor whose work focuses on untold stories of history, particularly the experiences of women whose contributions and suffering have been overlooked or suppressed in conventional historical accounts. She studied at Brigham Young University and has worked in publishing as an author and editor, developing a particular expertise in bringing archival research and survivor testimony together in narrative form accessible to general readers.
Her book The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women, published in 2017, told the story of the young women who painted luminous watch dials with radium paint in factories in Illinois and New Jersey in the 1910s and 1920s and subsequently suffered devastating radiation poisoning as their employers and the medical establishment denied any connection between their work and their illness. The women—many of them teenagers and young adults from immigrant families who needed the work and took pride in it—developed bone cancer, jaw deterioration, and systemic radiation damage while being told they had syphilis, or hysteria, or simply bad luck.
Moore reconstructed their stories from court records, personal diaries, letters, contemporary journalism, and medical records, creating a rich portrait of each woman as an individual rather than a type. The book was not only an account of corporate negligence and medical malfeasance but a story of legal and political resistance: several of the women, dying, fought successful lawsuits against their employers that established foundational precedents for worker safety law and the rights of injured workers to seek compensation. The Radium Girls became a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller and was widely praised for the quality of its research and the humanity of its portraits.
Moore has spoken extensively about her commitment to honoring the individuality of historical subjects whose stories are often reduced to symbols or statistics, insisting on the particularity of each woman’s personality, relationships, and choices even as she illuminates the structural forces that shaped their fate. Her work exemplifies a strand of popular history that foregrounds gender and labor in narratives of industrial modernity, recovering women’s experiences from the margins of histories that have centered male executives and policymakers.
Kate Moore continues to research and write history, and The Radium Girls has become a widely assigned text in high school and college courses on American labor history, women’s history, and the history of science and industry. The book has also been adapted for the stage and continues to generate new readers through educational contexts, ensuring that the women it honors are not forgotten a second time.
