Young, White, Female and Dying of Despair in Rural America

2016 National Fellow Monica Potts' book The Forgotten Girls was reviewed in the New York Times.

As part of the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, a subsidiary organization called U.N. Women released a report last year looking at global trends toward gender equality. By nearly every available metric — from access to clean water and a path out of poverty to feeling safe while walking alone in the dark — the report’s authors found that women’s push for parity is losing ground. At the current rate of progress, U.N. Women projects that it will take another 286 years — nine generations — for women to achieve legally protected equality.

Reading Monica Potts’s expansive first book, “The Forgotten Girls,” got me thinking about this grim scenario. The central question for Potts is why the life expectancy of America’s least educated white women has recently been shrinking. Many women are dying from what researchers call “diseases of despair”: suicide, drunken driving, overdoses. Using her rural hometown, Clinton, Ark., as a focal point, Potts drills down into the lives of women for whom such indicators are realities.