Analysis Of Monica Potts Essay What's Killing Poor White Women

In Monica Potts essay What’s Killing Poor White Women she details the steep decline in life expectancy for one very select group of people. That group is uneducated poor white women and that steep decline is a five year loss in life expectancy in the last 18 years. The problem with this is no one understands why and researchers have never seen such a sharp decline in such a short amount of time.

The main example for her essay is Crystal Wilson a 38 year old mother ordinary in every way. Crystal baby sat her granddaughter on the night of May 23, 2012, this night turned out to be her last. She was 38 years old and was carrying an unhealthy weight of more than 200 pounds. Crystal’s doctor had recently informed her that she was overweight and

diabetic but not many in the family knew and no one had any idea she was near death. She passed away in her sleep in the early morning. Crystal’s daughter Megan and the rest of her family were shocked and when Megan heard the news she couldn’t believe it she said “I thought it was my dad who had died because he was always the unhealthy one” (592) Coroner’s office arrived, pronounced Crystal dead at 11:40 am and let the family know an autopsy would be scheduled to figure out the cause of death. Crystal’s life was pretty normal overall except for her death. She was one of the white women who didn’t graduate- whose life expectancy had drastically declined over the last 18 years. In the 2st century, with so many advancements in science and technology, life expectancy has continued to rise. But all those advancements don’t trickle down to everyone especially with the great class divides we see today. “Lack of access to education, medical care, good wages, and healthy food isn’t just leaving the worst off Americans behind. Its killing them”. (Potts 593)

In a previous report women like Crystal were shown to be dying younger but only by about a year. Jay Olshansky and his colleagues decided to take this report one step further and separated the white women had not completed high school where as it previously included women that graduated high school but didn’t move onto college. What they found made news because researchers had not seen such a decline since Russian men when the Soviet Union fell. Women in the U.S. typically outlive men, but the decline from 79 years to 73 years in life expectancy suggest a large number of the women in this demographic have started to die in their 20’s – 40’s. What makes this drop so dramatic is that outside of the flu pandemic in 1918 everything has been steady with slow changes. Studies have found that education level is linked to living longer as far back as a study in the 1960’s. A more recent study by Adriana Lleras-Muney found that each additional year of higher education added a year of life. Muney admits that there could be other factors that are more important but they are extremely hard to measure.
Cave City, Arkansas is where Crystal called home. The town itself is home to around 1,900 people who all reside in single-wide neighborhoods along the highway. Pretty much all residents are white (96%) with a median household income of $29,000. Crystal lived in poverty and for most of her life the bills were covered by husband’s disability checks. As a child Crystal was well behaved in school and did fairly well until high school where she realized she was pretty far behind. But like many in her town she dropped out in 10th grade because she had married a man named Possum 12 years her senior.
It’s been known by researchers for quite some time that high school drop outs like Crystal are unlikely to live longer than people who have gone to college. But why the drastic change in the last 18 years? James Jackson, a public health researcher at University of Michigan, believes life just simply became more difficult in the last 20 years. “Hope is lowered. If you drop out of school, say, in the last 20 years or so, you just had less hope for ever making it and being anything,” Jackson says. “The opportunities available to you are very different than what they were 20 to 30 years ago. What kind of job are you going to get if you drop pout at 16? No job”.(598)
In May, Jennifer Montez of the Harvard University Center for Population and Development Studies co-authored the first paper investigating this problem.

Montez and her co-author wanted to take a different approach from the obvious cause of death and look at quality of life indicators. Such were they employed, married and how educated their spouse was and health behaviors. It’s well documented that unhealthy behavior like smoking leads to an earlier death but Crystal didn’t smoke. The researchers found that having a job mattered and not for the money for the sense of purpose. Work also connects women to friends and other social outings they would otherwise never have without their jobs. In fact, the only two factors Montez found significant were smoking and employment. But the major problem with this is that uneducated women are the least likely to work. Men with similar lack of education can always fall back on manual labor to make a decent living or a trade. Whereas uneducated women end up cleaning houses, serving food, and child care providers. Also if this women have children it never makes sense for them to go back to work because childcare these days is much more than the minimum wage they were

making.
Another interesting find from the lifespan study was that black women are now outliving their white counterparts without high school diplomas.

As group blacks are more likely to die young but black have recently closed the life expectancy gap. One theory suggests that uneducated white women tend to smoke, drink and abuse drugs more than black women. Meth and prescription drug abuse kill quickly and it could be that white women are just better at killing themselves. Factors like where you live and who your neighbors are also play a role because they can sometimes contribute to risky behavior. But something less tangible that researchers found is that white women in this demo are not only raising their children but their husbands as well. They’re typically the bread winners of the families and don’t take the benefits of that as a man would. So some would say the South is what’s really killing these

women.
Months prior to Crystal’s death she dealt with chest pain and even went to the emergency room but doctors determined it wasn’t a heart attack. During her life she had no major health problems outside of having ovarian cyst and a hysterectomy. Her husband Possum during this time was growing sicker and could barely walk. He was diagnosed with cancer a week before her death. The night of her death her husband said she woke up around 1 am to get a drink and went back to bed never to wake up again. The medical examiner’s report showed she died of natural causes. The police report lists no official cause of death. But it is believed that untreated diabetes most likely lead to cardiac arrest or a stroke.
In conclusion, poor white women are dying younger and at a rate of decline like we’ve never seen before. But the factor that most seems to be contributing to theirs death is life. As Steve Green said “I couldn’t help but wonder if maybe some of it might have been attributed to her system just being drug down from having to take care of Carl and Megan.” The school Superintendent went on to say “Just everyday stress”. (605) Steve is right these women at high percentage are forced into being the breadwinner, caretaker, mom, chef, and housemaid so how is it with all these jobs they would even have time to think of their own needs. Yes, alcohol abuse, smoking and drugs abuse leads to a large number of deaths in this demographic but for the ones that don’t abuse these its seems to be a combination of contributing factors. Life these days has just become much harder for poor uneducated white women.