Summary: The recently released film, The Help, based on Kathryn Stockett’s best-selling novel, foregrounds domestic service in the American imagination. Both the film and the novel have been met with both praise and criticism. The story is set in 1963 Mississippi during the era of Jim Crow laws and the rising Civil Rights Movement. Skeeter, an aspiring writer and naive young white women, is the center of the story. Uncomfortable with the racist treatment of African American women hired as maids in her family and friends' homes, she confronts the racism of white Mississippians indirectly by writing a book on domestic workers' experiences of racism and abuse in white employers’ homes. One of the central tensions in the story is the danger Skeeter places these maids in as a result of telling their stories. In the end, she triumphs as a hero by exposing the cruelty of Jim Crow laws and white employers' attitudes and prejudices and lands a coveted journalism job in New York City.
