The Forgotten Girls

What happens to a girl’s future when the forces shaping her life—place, church, school, work, and family—are pulling in the same direction, and that direction is down? In The Forgotten Girls, Monica Potts argues that the startling decline in life expectancy among less-educated white women in rural America cannot be understood through individual stories of bad choices alone. Instead, you have to see the whole web: a harsh landscape and economy, an evangelical culture that restricts women’s roles, a school system that quietly sorts girls out of opportunity, and thin social supports that make every setback catastrophic.

At the center is Potts’s hometown of Clinton, Arkansas, and her childhood best friend, Darci—a bright, funny, magnetic girl whose path bends from promise to peril. Potts positions Darci’s life alongside a decade of research on “deaths of despair” (Anne Case and Angus Deaton), the geography of poverty, and the ways education and social policy shape life spans. The book’s core claim is that people like Darci are not simply failing; they are being failed—by a place founded on impossible farming, by churches that substitute submission for agency, by schools and colleges that misinform about opportunity, by a labor market that evaporates, and by a health system that medicalizes suffering without treating its causes.

A Story That’s Bigger Than One Friend

Potts opens with data that startled the public-health world: in the last decade, less-educated white women have been dying younger, not just from overdoses and suicides, but also from cancer, heart disease, and chronic illness (Dartmouth economists Paul Novosad and Charlie Rafkin). The drivers—meth, opioids, alcohol; isolation; joblessness—cluster in places like Van Buren County. But the statistics only point toward the human fabric behind them. That is what this book reveals, stitch by stitch, through lived experience.

What You’ll Learn Here

You’ll travel through five interlocking worlds. First is place: the Ozarks’ rugged landscape, the legacy of failed settlement, and the modern “brain drain” that drains prospects and hope. Second is church: the pervasiveness of evangelical authority that shapes politics, limits girls’ imaginations, and recasts social crises as God’s plan. Third is school: how girls learn to shrink—sorted by subtle biases, bad sex education, and a college pipeline that undermatches rural talent. Fourth is trauma: the quiet epidemic of abuse and loss, and what happens when a town practices collective mourning without care or reform. Fifth is economy and health: the collapse of decent jobs, the rise of meth and opioids, the carceral churn, and why faith-based solutions—helpful for some—cannot substitute for comprehensive treatment.

Why This Matters to You

Even if you didn’t grow up in a rural county, Potts’s argument speaks to any community where opportunity narrows. You’ll recognize how institutions can accidentally sort people into destinies—and how easy it is, from far away, to mistake a structural trap for a personal failing. If you are a parent, teacher, pastor, public official, coach, or mentor, this lens helps you see the ripple effects of choices about schools, health care, policing, and politics. If you are a reader who left your hometown and wonders what changed (or what didn’t), this book offers language for the grief and the gap.

Key Idea

“Words like malaise and despair hint at stories that can’t be told with data and statistics.” Potts’s contribution is to braid the data to the story—showing how death rates are the surface ripples of deeper cultural currents.

How the Pieces Fit

Darci’s trajectory captures the intersections: a promising student in a town that prized conformity, labeled “boy crazy” in a culture of abstinence-only teaching, pulled from school not by a single choice but by cumulative forces—family turmoil, a punitive attendance cliff, early drug access, and no reliable mental-health care. Motherhood arrives not as a planned pivot but as the one role consistently available and endorsed. A violent partner, a shuttering labor market, and a faith-led but resource-thin treatment patchwork complete the trap.

Alongside Darci, Potts tells her own story: a mother who built a literal refuge on a hill; a sister, Ashley, who was brilliant and neurodivergent and died in a crash months before Potts left for Bryn Mawr; a college path opened by chance (a Barnard pre-college invite) and sustained by elite support structures—the kind that don’t exist in most rural schools. The divergence—one girl leaves and one stays—animates Potts’s central contention: education extends life not only because of what you learn, but because of the networks, buffers, and options it confers (see Adriana Lleras-Muney’s work on education and longevity).

Beyond Blame, Toward Solutions

Potts doesn’t offer easy fixes, but she makes clear what helps: comprehensive sex education; early, accurate college guidance; harm reduction and medication-assisted treatment (Nora Volkow, NIH); domestic-violence protections that are real and resourced; and public institutions—the library, school, health clinic—that work. Ultimately, she invites you to see what is at stake: if we continue to explain early death as private failure, we will keep losing girls like Darci to systems designed to forget them.

Potts argues that where you live shapes what feels possible. In Van Buren County—the southern edge of the Ozarks—settlers forced a rocky landscape into small farms that rarely produced enough to live on. That founding error echoes forward: a sparse population, weak tax base, and long distances make every institution fragile. Clinton’s courthouse square, once bustling, is now pocked by empty storefronts; even a beloved animal shelter shutters for lack of funds. This is the soil where despair grows.

What the Land Makes Possible

The Ozarks are beautiful but unforgiving. Towns cling to hilltops like School Hill; roads cut along ridgelines; rivers flood the bottoms. Early prosperity depended on bad bets—subsistence farming on poor soil, boom-and-bust construction, chicken processing, a lake-driven retirement economy. When the Great Recession hit, Clinton’s major employers vanished: a boat factory destroyed by a tornado didn’t return; a chicken plant closed; a frozen-food promise fizzled. A brief natural-gas boom busted just as quickly. The result: sporadic, seasonal work for men; low-wage service jobs for women; and a yawning sense of stuckness.

History That Lingers

Potts surfaces a racial history many towns bury. The county’s free Black communities—Solomon Grove and Zion Grove—faced violent displacement; Ozark whites tell themselves they were “too poor to own slaves,” but the record shows otherwise. That history feeds a contemporary posture: doubling down on homogeneity, equating safety with sameness, and resisting change. In practice it means fewer newcomers, fewer businesses, and fewer ideas. (Compare Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste and Heather McGhee’s The Sum of Us on how status threats harden zero-sum thinking.)

Brain Drain, Service Desert

The best-prepared graduates leave. Potts did—first to a Barnard pre-college program by chance, then to Bryn Mawr on financial aid. Those who return fill the old roles—teacher, dentist, coach—often reinforcing the status quo. Those who stay without degrees inherit shrinking opportunity. As enrollment falls, schools consolidate; post offices close; hospital buildings become bargaining chips. With fewer taxpayers and aging residents, counties face impossible choices: cut the library or the fire department? Your daily life shrinks without your consent.

Key Idea

When places hollow out, private virtue can’t compensate for public absence. Good moms and good pastors can’t pave roads, fund mental-health clinics, or run evidence-based treatment programs by themselves.

How Place Scripted Darci

Darci grew up across from the high school, with a den that became a teen clubhouse. Geography made risk feel ordinary: parties on School Hill, swimming in Greers Ferry Lake, bonfires on the Mountain. Drugs are plentiful on the margins—meth labs hidden in the woods, pill bottles in kitchen drawers, beer in the trunk for a dry county’s teens. When wages fall and meaning thins, substances offer both income and relief. For Darci and her partner, George, the landscape itself—isolated trailers, family cemeteries, winding roads—made it easier to slip out of school and into danger without anyone noticing until it was too late.

What This Means for You

If you’re trying to help in a place like Clinton, start with the map. Distance itself is a barrier. So build supports that collapse distance: school-based clinics, mobile treatment, librarians who double as FAFSA guides, broadband that actually works. And recognize that “just move” is neither realistic nor morally neutral; moving requires information, money, risk tolerance, and a safety net—exactly what the most vulnerable don’t have.

In Clinton, church isn’t just Sunday; it’s the operating system. Potts shows how evangelical institutions—especially the Southern Baptist Church—set the cultural weather: prayer at games, Bible school as summer camp, youth groups as social life, and pastors as de facto political leaders. For girls, the key lesson is submission: to God, to pastors, to husbands. That posture not only shapes private life; it dictates policy preferences and narrows the imagination of what a girl can be.

Submission as a Civic Habit

In an adult Sunday school Potts attends, the theme is “the benefits of submitting to authority.” You hear it everywhere: God writes your story; your job is to obey. For women, that means living under male authority—the husband, the pastor, the superintendent. When officials attend the same church, dissent looks like sin. The result is a subtle (and sometimes overt) social control that can enforce censorship (a bid to ban Summer of My German Soldier for “damn”) and police girls’ bodies and voices.

Purity Culture and Public Policy

Abstinence-only education arrives branded by “True Love Waits” and promise rings. It does not lower sexual activity; it does increase risk (Journal of Adolescent Health). Girls learn sex will kill you (a coach’s condom lecture says AIDS passes through “microscopic holes”). If you do have sex, marry the boy. Vanessa—fifteen, called a “ho” by classmates—marries a 24-year-old preacher’s son in Missouri because Arkansas won’t allow it. The town sees scandal; the church sees rescue. The cycle tightens: early marriage, early parenthood, fewer educational options.

“This World Is Not My Home”

A beloved hymn says earth is temporary; heaven is the goal. That theology can comfort the grieving—Potts hears it after her sister Ashley dies—but it can also anesthetize civic responsibility. If suffering is God’s plan, why invest in prevention? Why build mental-health services if prayer suffices? (Contrast with Katelyn Beaty’s A Woman’s Place, which argues for women’s calling beyond the home.)

Key Idea

When churches are the most functional institutions in town, they become everything—school board, safety net, gatekeeper. That can help individuals; it can also crowd out pluralistic, evidence-based solutions.

Darci Inside This System

Darci’s mom, Virginia, is a gentle Adventist-turned-Baptist who “just gives it up to God.” She runs vacation Bible school and keeps the household tenderly together. But when Darci fights, screams, or asks for boundaries, Virginia folds—prayer stands in for discipline. When Darci’s life begins to collapse, the treatment options that appear are overwhelmingly faith-based (Dorcas House, Jeremiah House). Some help—community, rest, purpose. Yet when Darci relapses on cold medicine, she’s out. You see a pattern: the church opens its arms and sets its rules, but if you fail those rules, you fall through.

What This Means for You

If you’re partnering with churches, meet them where they are—and bring complements they can’t provide alone: medication-assisted treatment, domestic-violence protection orders that stick, comprehensive sex ed, trauma counseling. And teach girls a bigger gospel: agency, leadership, and the holiness of asking hard questions.

Schools in Clinton are warm and personal—and they quietly route young women toward narrower lives. Potts shows how girls’ self-esteem plunges after elementary school (American Association of University Women; David & Myra Sadker). Teachers compliment boys on achievement and girls on appearance; boys misbehave and get coached; girls comply and disappear. When challenges spike—sex, math anxiety, family chaos—girls like Darci drop advanced classes, then stop showing up, and then discover an unforgiving attendance cliff: 78 missed days means no diploma, even with good grades.

Bad Information, Small Dreams

Guidance can change a life—and so can its absence. Potts’s own path changed because Barnard mailed her a booklet and a staffer found her aid. In contrast, Gisselle, a bright, immigrant class president, dreams of Vanderbilt, gets no robust counseling, misses scholarship deadlines, and ends up at a community college by default—capable, determined, and undermatched (Alexandria Walton Radford; UCLA/Arizona research on elite recruitment bias). Multiply that story and you get a brain drain by accident rather than intention.

The College “Basics” Trap

At big state schools, low-income students face large intro classes, confusing bureaucracies, and jobs that devour time (Armstrong & Hamilton, Paying for the Party). Cassandra leaves a full scholarship to chase party life with friends; she returns later as a nurse after detours and grit. Darci lasts a week in a Little Rock technical college—the commute is long, the classes feel empty, the stipend disappears, and so does school. Without mentors to translate the system, “I’ll try next semester” becomes never.

Grit Isn’t a Policy

“Teach grit” became a fad after the Marshmallow Test, but later research (Tyler Watts) shows delay of gratification tracks with family context. In Clinton, context is destiny: no AP classes; abstinence-only myths; counselors who don’t know elite aid policies; families terrified their kids will never return if they leave. Asking a girl to be grittier without changing the inputs is a setup.

• Change the inputs: accurate sex ed; FAFSA nights; AP/dual-enrollment; paid campus visits.
• Build buffers: emergency grants, food pantries, on-campus jobs that flex.
• Match talent to fit: broaden college lists; use data tools that flag undermatch.

Key Idea

Education extends life not by magic, but by multiplying options, networks, and safety nets. It’s the difference between a stumble and a spiral.

Darci’s Cliff

Darci had the scores (a 22 on the ACT as a sophomore) and the spark. What she didn’t have was a net when family chaos, early drugs, and the culture’s moral policing collided. Her principal enforced the attendance rule; no one intervened before the cliff. She leaves without a diploma, still technically college-eligible but psychologically unmoored. Years later, employment forms with a “high school diploma” checkbox become fresh shame. That’s how a bureaucracy can feel like a life sentence.

Potts dissects how a town teaches girls to be responsible for everybody’s morality while denying them information to protect themselves. “Boy crazy” is the label; girls are the problem to be solved. The costs are borne by girls like Darci and Vanessa—stigma, early marriage, isolation—even when their behavior mirrors boys’ or responds to adult men’s pursuit.

Abstinence Doesn’t Equal Safety

At school, a coach “teaches” that condoms let AIDS through microscopic holes. At church, a pledge ring stands in for contraception. In real life, sex happens anyway: a seventh grader hides in a bathroom fearing pregnancy; Darci is propositioned at eleven by a fourteen-year-old; older boys lurk outside windows. When pregnancy occurs, marriage is the imagined remedy. Vanessa’s parents—good, churchgoing, scared—let their fifteen-year-old marry a twenty-four-year-old preacher’s son because home feels more dangerous.

Motherhood as the Only Door

Because other avenues (college, careers) feel gated, motherhood becomes the available adulthood. Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas (in Promises I Can Keep) find low-income women choose motherhood because it’s meaningful and immediate. Darci, at twenty-two, decides “I’m going to just be a mother and do this.” In Clinton, that choice is legible, affirmed, and resourced within families; other ambitions feel selfish or fragile.

Gendered Judgment, Gendered Risk

Girls who have sex are “ruined”; boys who have sex are boys. Adults publicly mourn some kids (from “the right families”) and ignore others. After Ashley’s death, Potts sees this selective communal empathy; Darci and Vanessa experience its teenage version—ridicule for bodies, reputations policed by peers and preachers. Those judgments push girls toward secrecy, not safety.

• Teach consent and contraception early; don’t outsource health to rumor.
• Make reproductive services accessible within driving distance—no questions, no shaming.
• Treat early marriage to adults as exploitation, not sanctification.

Key Idea

When you combine abstinence-only messaging with adult silence and male impunity, you don’t prevent sex—you prevent safety.

Darci’s Tipping Points

Darci’s first sex isn’t a rite of passage; it’s a quiet severing—from her friend group’s approval, from a teacher’s protective gaze, from her own dream map to California. Her miscarriage at seventeen is handled alone: a Conway clinic visit, a forged excuse note, no confidants, not even the boyfriend. That solitude calcifies into a habit: handle everything yourself, ask no one for help, pretend it’s fine. Years later, that reflex will keep her from seeking safety—from partners, drugs, and despair.

Beneath the moral talk, Potts uncovers a town soaked in trauma. Mothers reveal, almost casually, childhood molestation (“Half of Clinton,” one says). Domestic violence is common and often spiritualized (“pray for him”). Death is omnipresent—teen crashes, overdoses, suicides—yet structural prevention is rare. People absorb blow after blow without naming it, then call it God’s will. That’s not piety; it’s unprocessed grief.

Transgenerational Wounds

Potts learns late that her own mother, Kathy, was a teen mom whose four-year-old son, Brian, died in a fall; she returned to Arkansas alone, ashamed, and determined her daughters would leave town. Darci learns her mom lost a baby to an ear infection years before she was born. These stories lie locked in chests and whispered journals. The CDC’s Adverse Childhood Experiences research puts Arkansas at the top of childhood trauma rates. Pain travels across time when no one is equipped to interrupt it.

Public Mourning, Private Neglect

After Ashley’s death in a car crash, the town performs its ritual: assemblies, casseroles, a theology of “God called her home.” But there’s no policy review of teen driving norms, no new guardrails on sharp curves, no counseling surge. Ashley becomes easier to love in memory than in life. That civic pattern repeats: we valorize the lost; we ignore the living who need help today.

When Care Is a Prescription

With few therapists and a stigma around mental health, suffering gets medicalized. Darci’s medical file is a moving box: ER visits for “being jacked up on coffee,” black eyes, “scratches in a simulated attempt,” postpartum spirals, and requests for pain shots “for the ride home.” Doctors rotate; prescriptions accumulate. The system catches symptoms, not causes. (Nora Volkow, NIH, urges clinicians to treat suffering, not just pain.)

Key Idea

If your only tools are prayer and pills, you will call trauma “sin” and medicate despair. People need both solace and systems.

What You Can Do

Normalize screening for ACEs in schools and clinics; embed counselors where kids already are; fund domestic-violence shelters with long stays; create grief groups not run by pastors alone. And when tragedy strikes, pair casseroles with policy: change the curve, not just the mood.

Potts threads the macro and the micro: a labor market that collapses into Walmart wages, and an addiction crisis that becomes both income stream and anesthesia. Meth and opioids fill the void left by stable jobs. Policing and pulpits step in where clinics and counselors are thin, and women—already pressured to serve and submit—become the shock absorbers for everyone’s pain.

From Paychecks to Pills

Blue-collar families earn what they did in 1978; recessions hit rural places sooner and end later. For George, work is sporadic—quarry shifts, odd construction, dreams of plumbing that never materialize. For Darci, “good” jobs are receptionist at Ferrellgas or carhop at Sonic; neither comes with childcare, stability, or a ladder. When her back hurts after a crash, a pain clinic puts her on methadone. When the script runs out, meth is cheaper, closer, and un-policed by pharmacies. Soon meth is breakfast.

Violence in the Vacuum

Economic strain correlates with domestic abuse, even without unemployment (Fragile Families Study). George hits, threatens to kill, and gloats that cousins in law enforcement will cover him. Darci gets a protection order; it’s dismissed. She leaves and returns, because where do you go in a county with one shelter, no cash, and kids?

Carceral Whirlpools

When Darci embezzles $13,000 to survive, the system responds: jail, probation, court fines, fees, bench warrants for missed dates, and a parole-violators program that feels like a boot camp. Faith-based rehab offers structure and love—and a hard exit for rule-breaking. Harm reduction is rare; Suboxone is controversial; relapse is treated as moral failure. Over and over, Darci rides the cycle: release, silence, spiral, arrest.

• Make medication-assisted treatment (MAT) standard and nearby; measure success as stability, not purity.
• Fund civil legal aid for protection orders and custody; tie it to housing vouchers.
• Replace fines-and-fees traps with sliding scales; offer transportation to court.

Key Idea

Abstinence-only logic migrated from sex ed to addiction policy. It fails in both places.

A Glimpse of What Works

Late in the book, a doctor connects Darci to Suboxone and group therapy; the cravings recede; she returns to work at a gas station, mends some family ties, and builds boring routines. It’s fragile and real—proof that medication plus community can make sobriety stick. The question the book leaves you with: why did it take so long to offer what works?

The book’s emotional engine is the split-screen friendship. Two smart girls make a map in a school atlas and dream of California. One leaves for Bryn Mawr after her sister’s death; one stays and slowly disappears. Potts revisits home, not as a savior but as a witness wrestling with love, anger, and responsibility. If you’ve ever left a place you love, you’ll feel the ache here.

The Price of Exit

Leaving gave Potts options and longevity buffers: deans who read letters about grief, counseling centers, work-study jobs, generous aid. It cost her, too—distance from family, suspicion from hometown peers, and the slow realization she’d stopped answering Darci’s letters after Ashley died. She learns the cost of not being there the night Darci is arrested on the courthouse square, then blames herself for driving away from a trailer on Bee Branch Mountain the next Christmas Eve.

The Price of Staying

Staying gave Darci belonging and a mother’s kitchen—but also a smaller horizon, men who knew how to find her, and institutions that saw her primarily as a sinner, a defendant, or a client. When she tries to leave (a road trip West, stints at rehab), gravity pulls her back: custody arrangements, empty bank accounts, distance, and shame.

What Friendship Demands

Potts refuses two easy stories: “I saved her” or “She doomed herself.” Instead, she sits with the in-betweens—riding to parole check-ins, stocking her car with snacks, trying not to moralize while also protecting her own boundaries. She names what many of us feel toward people we love who are struggling: compassion braided with fatigue, judgment braided with grief. That honesty is a gift.

Key Idea

“Did I have anything to atone for?” Potts asks. The answer is not a single act but a practice: keep showing up, widen the net, and fight the systems that made leaving the only lifeline.

Your Move

Wherever you live, you can build bridges that shorten the distance between leaving and staying: mentor a first-gen student through applications; fund a bus that takes kids to campus visits; partner churches with MAT providers; open your library late for FAFSA completion; advocate for sidewalks so kids can walk safely to school. These are small acts that add up to additional years of life.