Text Review- The Help

I chose to watch the movie The Help for this assignment. This movie was set in the 1960’s in Jackson, Mississippi where racism was still very prevalent and there was still segregation everywhere. The movie is about black housemaids named Minny and Abileen who worked for mean and hateful white families and were treated badly. They were paid less than $1 an hour to do basically everything around the house including raising the children and they were treated like property. A white educated young woman named Skeeter was the only one that treated them with respect and she began writing a book about their stories as housemaids. Many housemaids were hesitant to participate because they were scared that they would be arrested or beaten but when many of them did participate, the book was published and was a huge hit and changed the way many people saw the housemaids.

I chose this movie for this assignment because it shows the concept of the One and the Other very well. The white families were the ‘one’ and the black housemaids were the ‘other’. They were treated like property and they knew that there was nothing that they could do about it because their voice was never heard. In the movie, the worst housewife was named Hilly and she told all of the other wives that they should not let their housemaid use the same bathroom as them because she said they were disgusting and that they had diseases. They were dehumanized and not treated as people, only referred to as “the help”. There was a huge difference in the socioeconomic status of the white families and the black housemaids, the white families were all very rich but the black housemaids were poor and were paid below minimum wage. Hilly also accused Abileen of stealing at the end of the movie even though they both knew that that was not true but no one would believe Abileen over a rich white woman like Hilly because of the power that she held. This movie was a great example of this concept because it really showed how bad that these housemaids were treated and how they did not even try to say something because they knew that their voice would not be heard until a woman like Skeeter went against the status quo to tell their side of the story.