The Help: Aibileen Clark And Minny Jackson

The Help takes place in Jackson, Mississippi, in the year of 1962. Aibileen Clark and Minny Jackson are two of many maids who work for white, middle-class families. Skeeter, a white progressive woman who’s recently graduated from Ole Miss, is bothered by the way African American maids were being treated, decides she wants to write a book about inequality of black people and expose the problem with the help from Aibileen and Minny. Though at first, they didn’t want to do, scared people would find out and they would be attacked, they eventually decide they needed to do something, so they worked with Skeeter to document their experiences as maids and anonymously publish the finished book, called, "The Help." As I watched this movie I observed

when Skeeter goes to get a job at the Jackson journal, she is given the housecleaning column, this demonstration how the very few women who did have jobs were given jobs that society considered to be “feminine”, things like housekeeping, beauty, secretaries etc. the role of white woman In Jackson Mississippi in 1960s, society had a very simple and strong idea about the way women were to fit into the routines and challenges for everyday life and what was to be expected of them, their main role was to find a husband, get married and raise a family. A woman’s main job and occupation was to take care of her husband, children, and home, as careers were strongly inadvisable. To make use of their time, being part of the high socialites, they would host benefit balls to raise money for charities. Colored women particularly in the South were often required to work as well as their husbands, to be able to support their families. Revealing how their situation in life were very different from that of the white woman. A black woman was usually a cook, housekeeper, nursemaid, or all three in made into one for a white family. Since they had to work they would have to have someone else come and take care of and help raise their kids, while they had to take care of and help raise their employer’s children, this is an example of the social conflict

It portrays class as providing the basis for Jackson’s white society: the wealthy are at the top and poor at the bottom. Elizabeth Leefolt and Celia Foote represent how a white Southern woman can navigate social class. Elizabeth comes from a good family but doesn’t have any inheritance and her husband’s low income mean that she cannot fully participate in wealthy high society. Elizabeth hides her family’s lack of wealth with symbols of class, by hiring a maid she can barely pay, since having a maid showed you to be of higher class, For example, to appear wealthy and follow the conventions of her racist society, Elizabeth gives in to Hilly’s suggestion that she needs to build a separate bathroom for “the help.” So, they won’t get the diseases she believed black people to have, Celia Foote’s social class is kind of opposite of Elizabeth’s. Since Celia comes from a poor, “white trash” family but marries into a wealthy one, she does not have knowledge of the unwritten rules of middle-class white way of life but has the wealth to be able to be in the high-class society, since Celia is most likely unaware of how white women are “supposed” to treat black people as inferior, She treats Minny, her maid, with respect unlike how most of the others did treated their maids. Something I found to be interesting was to how it showed the way those in lower class had