I had never heard of Angela Brazil before I went looking for more “school stories” for my children, who were hooked on Enid Blyton’s Mallory Towers series. It was the middle of the pandemic, and, with our library closed and funds a little tight to feed my bookworms’ ferocious appetites, I turned to books in the public domain through Gutenberg . I thoroughly enjoyed Brazil’s books, but I knew that my children, and their friends, would be tripped up by many of the antiquated words that even I had to look up. The Nicest Girl in the School was originally published in 1910, and set perhaps just a year or two before that, which places it firmly in the Edwardian era. Girls such as the characters in this book would have enjoyed a society that was much more relaxed and exciting than the stricter Victorian era their parents experienced. The Women’s Suffrage Movement had just begun to gain traction after many decades of groundwork (though it would still be nearly a decade before the vote was...

Ordinarily, when I think of Women’s History Month, I tend to look at the stories of great women whose accomplishments were often overlooked during their lives, or those whose achievements were noteworthy because of the obstacles overcome along the way. Recently, however, when researching Illinois history sites, I stumbled across a story of women whose health was damaged while they worked diligently to earn a living for their families in the 1920s. The article was called The Radium Girls: An Illinois Tragedy . I’d never heard of the women who died of radium poisoning years after working at a radium dial company, painting dials with a special mix that glowed in the dark. The article suggests perhaps thousands of people, mostly women, died from the poisoning. Kate Moore wrote a book called The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women (2017) and discusses women who worked at similar companies in other states as well. Consider another great tragedy that affected a larg...