Since the turn of the century, white women have been dying prematurely in a slow-motion crisis driven by decaying health in rural and small-town America, a Washington Post analysis found. While rates of early mortality have continued to fall for women of other races, and have flattened out among white women in big cities, death rates among small-city and rural white women in their early 40s, for example, have shot up 47 percent since 1990.