"What's Killing Poor White Women?"

"For work, people drive to the college town of Batesville, about 20 minutes south, which has a chicken-processing plant that periodically threatens to close and an industrial bakery with 12-hour shifts that make it hard for a mother to raise children. Less than 13 percent of county residents have a bachelor’s degree. Society is divided into opposites: Godly folk go to church and sinners chase the devil, students go to college and dropouts seek hard labor, and men call the shots and women cook for them...Crystal dropped out in the tenth grade because she had married. That was the way things were. None of Crystal’s siblings finished high school. Instead, they became adults when they were teenagers. Crystal would spend the rest of her years as a housewife to a husband who soon became ill and as a mother to a daughter who would grow up as fast as she did. 

Researchers have long known that high-school dropouts like Crystal are unlikely to live as long as people who have gone to college. But why would they be slipping behind the generation before them? James Jackson, a public-health researcher at the University of Michigan, believes it’s because life became more difficult for the least-educated in the 1990s and 2000s. Broad-scale shifts in society increasingly isolate those who don’t finish high school from good jobs, marriageable partners, and healthier communities...

Something less tangible, it seems, is shaping the lives of white women in the South, beyond what science can measure. Surely these forces weigh on black women, too, but perhaps they are more likely to have stronger networks of other women. Perhaps after centuries of slavery and Jim Crow, black women are more likely to feel like they’re on an upward trajectory. Perhaps they have more control relative to the men in their communities. In low-income white communities of the South, it is still women who are responsible for the home and for raising children, but increasingly they are also raising their husbands. A husband is a burden and an occasional heartache rather than a helpmate, but one women are told they cannot do without."

http://prospect.org/article/whats-killing-poor-white-women

This longread tells the story of Crystal, a poor white woman who died unexpectedly in 2013, and her family. The narrative is interspersed with studies exploring the link between rural poverty and decreasing life expectancies, and some conjectures from the author and people in Crystal's community.

I wanted the piece about race to be addressed differently, maybe from a few non-white perspectives too?, but otherwise this drew me into a very different world from my own and illustrated these really complex public health challenges.