Social Stratification In The Movie The Help

ianna Mutter Dissent in America Emil Studinski November 19th, 2015 Freedom Summer Freedom Summer is a documentary film directed by Stanley Nelson. It chronicles the summer of 1964, often called the Freedom Summer. During the month of june in 1964 over seven hundred students from all over the country rode buses to Mississippi with the goal to register as many African Americans to vote as possible. During the time of intense discrimination and the Jim Crow laws of the south, African Americans were most likely not able to vote in elections.

In the novel entitled, The Help, race is a socially constructed concept. Jackson, Mississippi is an extremely segregated society where the majority of the white population creates rules that try to differentiate blacks from whites. However, there are a group of white individuals that stand for equality, which in turn could lead to danger amongst each other. Although Mississippi is the setting, seemingly different women joined together to change the way coloured maids were viewed. They set aside the false stereotypes of black individuals as well as white and spoke against it.

Kathryn Stockett’s The Help, attests to the hateful and cruel reality that is the life of African Americans in Jackson, Mississippi circa the 1960’s. Stockett writes many anecdotes surrounding the relationship between Constantine, an African American maid, and the child she cares for, Skeeter. Skeeter reflects upon a memory of Constantine and

The Help is an inspiring novel that tells the tale of black servants, or often referred to as the help, that work for white women and families in the 1960s. The protagonists of this tale, Skeeter, Aibileen, and Minny, work together to write a book of true and heartbreaking stories of the colored ‘help’ in America. The author uses the characters inner thoughts and dialogue to convey a powerful message and theme to the audience that is often forgot about in today’s society, there is no difference between us no matter our race, gender, or religion. Throughout this novel we Aibileen and Minny be constantly scrutinized because of the color of their skin, and we see Skeeter and the other I'm women that use help be humiliated because of their gender.

The Help directed by Tate Taylor is a film about the town of Jackson, Mississippi in the 1960s during the Black Civil Rights period. A white female, Skeeter takes on the stories of coloured maids to write a book that would go onto sell worldwide to help get the uncommonly heard point of view of the help be heard. A common theme that features throughout the film is resilience. I agree strongly with the way Skeeter as a character was used to take action in order to help the coloured community.

The movie, The Help by Tate Taylor, is about the treatment of African American maids during the 1960s and the main character, Skeeter Phelan trying to help them by publishing a novel about how the maids were treated like and how it affected their life. Both of these stories take place in the

This movie shows the struggles that women have working in such a male dominated workforce. Katherine, Dorothy, and Mary were African American women and this movie showed their struggles on trying to prove themselves to their Caucasian colleagues. My question that I want to answer throughout this

The Help is set in the 1960’s Mississippi where Jim Crow laws were in full effect. This story shed some light on the horrific, demeaning treatment blacks were subjected to at the hands of “White America”. Unfortunately, this is only one aspect of what life was like being an African American in the early 60’s. My grandfather grew up in Montgomery Alabama, as a child he witnessed the hanging of a family friend for refusing to walk his handicap sister in the middle of the road; off the sidewalk. He was sick of being treated unequal, so he tried to exercise his freedom from slavery which is a basic human right.

In Kathryn Stockett’s novel, The Help, characters’ actions demonstrate the importance of finding one’s inner voice and making right decisions even though they go against social prejudice. As the novel suggests, women live in Jackson are expected to play the role of virtuous wives and caring mothers. Miss Celia is one of the characters that suffers from the gender stereotype and is not able to control their own life. Fortunately, she finally overcomes these gender norms and decides to present her true self. After the Benefit, Minny tells Celia the pie story about Miss Hilly, which motives Celia to cut down the Mimosa tree.

Moreover, demonstrate consequences are taken to oppress racial and ethnic minorities to keep them in a subservient position. Overall, this film has provided me with a visual depiction of how stereotypes are a mental tool that enforces racial segregation and self-hate. The label of “White” became a necessity for Sarah Jane to achieve in society. To attain it she needed to move to a new city, change her name and deny her mother.

Synopsis: The making of this movie was adapted from the book “The Help” written by Kathryn Stockett in 2009. The story is taken place in the 1960’s, and a young writer chooses to interview one of the African American maids that would also raise the children of the whites. So as the writer and maid collaborate, a lot more colored women come forward to participate in writing, and it turns out to be a big step to show everyone what they had to face with the unfair treatment. No historians were

The social groups focused on in this novel are white housewives, whose group consists of Skeeter, the privileged daughter of a farmer, who just returned from college, and “the help” or a group of maids who are of course of African American decent. The help is forced to obey their irrationally needy bosses, cooking for them, cleaning for them, and even raising their children, only to be treated inhumanely and unfairly by petty housewives. For example, one of the housewives, Hilly Holbrook, a seemingly conflicting character alone, was very suggestive of a bathroom act being enforced, which made it mandatory that every home have a separate bathroom for its help as a “safety precaution” because they could transmit diseases through their bodily functions. In situations like these, African Americans were very alienated, and it really displayed the gap in reality for the two groups. This in turn caused conflict between them, as African Americans were looked down at by whites and the whites were seen as threatening and wicked minded by African Americans.

Kathryn Stockett’s novel, The Help, is a novel that not only shows the severe discrimination in the south but also reveals the dishonorable act of keeping secrets. The novel is set in the early 1960’s in Jackson, Mississippi. This teaches us how the unfortunate truth of how african american maids were treated by the white families they worked for. It explains the lives of Celia Foote who was a white lady who doesn't believe in the social boundaries of Jackson, Mississippi and a strong african american women named Aibileen Clark. Secrets are impractical because they don't come without a cost, not all secrets are as bad as you think they are so why keep them, and at the end of the day you will feel a breath of relief and feel free.

Nazish S. Quraishi Professor Ahmadi ENGL 101-13 10 January 2016 Courage Triumphs over Racism The film “The Help” (November 24, 2011) of genre historical fiction directed and scripted by Tate Taylor is a faithful adaptation of the bestseller novel The Help penned by Kathryn Stockett. It is a story about how three women team up to form an alliance and secretively work on a writing project that would be shunned otherwise. The film portrayed the time when segregation existed between the whites and the blacks to be specific in the early 1960s in Jackson, Mississippi. The film began with a flash-forward scene where Aibileen a black domestic maid is being interviewed, how it feels to work for a white family?

The movie clearly exposes the many ways that the human dignity of African- American maids was ignored. They had suffered daily embarrassment but were able to claim their own way dignity. The film described about empowerment of individuals as well as about social justice for a group. It is a moving story depicting dehumanization in a racist culture but also the ability to move beyond the unjust structures of society and to declare the value of every human being.