Black Maids In The Help

Set in Jackson, Mississippi ‘The Help’ written by Kathryn Stockett; is about the struggles that African American maids went through while working in a white household during the 1960’s. Black maids were entrusted with the young lives of the white children from ‘privileged families’ but were barred from using the same supermarkets, library’s or something so superficial as a bathroom. Stockett tells this story of risk, racism and courage through three different women, Aibileen Clark, Minny Jackson and Skeeter (Eugenia Phelan).

Skeeter is a young privileged white girl who has recently come home from completing her four-year journalism (English) degree at the University of Mississippi. Skeeter the same as every other white privileged child was brought up by a black maid Constantine; Skeeter saw Constantine as more than just the help but as family. When Constantine leaves the Phelan household to live with

This realisation causes Skeeter to push for the truth not just about Constantine’s disappearance but about the way other black maids are being treated in white households. Throughout life the white children, raised by black maids were taught that those who raised them were below them, to treat them with no respect and that you did not have to be kind to those who lay below you in the social hierarchy. “The day your child says she hates you, and every child will go through the phase, it kicks like a foot in the stomach.” Throughout the journey Skeeter realised that someone who missed some of the most important periods of her life had dictated the way she lived. “All my life I’d been told what to believe about politics, coloreds, being a girl. But with Constantine's thumb pressed in my hand, I realized I actually had a choice in what I could believe.”