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

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

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