American white women are dying younger

It's highly unusual for death rates to increase in first world countries - the usual trend is for people to live longer. However, American white women are now dying younger than they once did. This is particularly true for rural white women. Black women, in comparison, have continued the expected trend of living longer.

Here are some graphs from the Washington Post illustrating the phenomenon. The first one shows the changes in the mortality rates from 1990 onwards for those aged 30 to 34:

You can see that things have improved considerably for black men and women in that age group. For black women, for instance, the mortality rate has declined by 40%. The situation for white men improved until about the year 2000 and has then declined. For white women mortality has worsened by over 20%.

The situation is worst for white women living in rural areas or small cities:

You can see that the trends have been bad for all whites in this age group since about the year 2000. However, it is worst for rural women, whose mortality rates have increased by well over 40%.

Why are white women dying younger? For the 30 to 34 year olds, it is mainly due to drug overdoses, with suicide also being a factor. For older white women, cirrhosis of the liver (heavy drinking) is another big factor, as is heart disease.

The graph above shows those causes of death that have increased since the year 2000. You can see that for both urban and rural women aged 50 to 54 that there has been an increase in deaths from drug overdoses, cirrhosis of the liver and suicide, and also from various lung diseases.

The question that is not fully answered in the Washington Post article is why white women are succumbing to drugs, alcohol and depression - particularly at a time when black women's health outcomes are significantly improving.

I'm not going to attempt  to answer that question now. I'd just point out that feminism does not seem to be making white women any happier.

Feminist mother and son

Think of what feminists commonly believe:

1. Differences between men and women are not natural but exist because of the patriarchy.

2. Under the patriarchy the male is the human default setting, the female is therefore not thought to be fully human.

3. White males uphold the patriarchy to defend their privilege at the expense of women and people of colour.

If you were a woman and you really believed these things, would it not complicate your relations with men? Is it not possible that you would feel negatively toward men as a class?

Enter Polly Dunning. She is a third generation feminist (her mother is the feminist commentator Jane Caro). In a column for the Sydney Morning Herald she writes of how conflicted she felt when she learned that she was carrying a boy child rather than a girl:

I had never wanted a son. I wanted daughters...This seemed altogether to fit in with my feminism better. It was more comfortable to me. But when the sonographer pointed out my son's dangly bits in our 19-week scan, it was clear that I was going to raise a son. The anxious feeling I had about this daunting prospect lasted a few weeks as I came to terms with why I felt the way I did and how I could let it go.

There were two parts to the feeling: I had to mourn the life I thought I was supposed to have...and I had to come to terms with having a relationship with a son that I had never really considered. There were dark moments in the middle of the night (when all those dark thoughts come), when I felt sick at the thought of something male growing inside me.

The bolded part was noticed by a number of media outlets and seems now to have been edited (replaced by "when I felt sick with worry thinking about how I would go about raising a son.")

So what's a feminist to do? How do you reconcile the ideology with mothering a son? Polly Dunning's solution is the gruesome one of subjecting her son to a kind of feminist cleansing process:

In this patriarchal world, this world where even the best men (and women, for that matter) engage in casual and ingrained sexism, how will I raise a son who respects me the way a daughter would? Who sees women as just like him? As just human beings?

...People are constantly telling me "boys are easier" to raise (casual and ingrained sexism, anyone?), but I think they are much harder. How do you raise a white, middle-class boy not to think his own experience is the default experience of the world?

How do you counter a society that makes things easier for him than for others, and make him see it? See how it is for women, for people of colour?

Raising a boy who maintains the status quo sure would be easy, but I refuse to be satisfied with that. I will raise a feminist boy. Just like his father and grandfathers before him, but even better. I will point sexism out to him at every turn, and he will never get away with it without being called out. I will show him that girls are just people like him and that products and art targeted at them are no less valuable or enjoyable. He will be immersed in feminism by a family who models it in their everyday life.

She wants a son who will respect her, even as she points out his sexism and privilege at every turn. I don't like her chances. I know some feminist mothers and the usual result is an exasperated son who is "shorter" with his mother than boys usually are.

Polly Dunning is likely to love her son and repel him in equal measure.