Skeeter becomes alienated due to her choices of not being married, and because of how her perspective on the division between white Southern households and black maids has changed due to being in the city and going to college. She also crosses social boundaries in the movie to write a book about the lives of black maids in the South, which is a highly controversial and could have gotten the maids who helped fired and shunned. These characteristics are what help her further her transformation from the women she was raised to be to the independent, brave woman who chooses her own
As an experienced maid who comes from generations of slaves and housemaids, she takes great pride in her job. She describes her life as “Taking care a white babies,” “along with all the cooking and the cleaning” (Stockett, 7). =, it seems as though Aibileen allows her job to take over her entire life. In order to compensate for a white mothers’ lack of care for her children, Aibileen is shown to be caring to her charges.
In the book Ar’n’t I a women the author, Deborah Gray White, explains how the life was for the slave women in the Southern plantations. She reveals to us how the slave women had to deal with difficulties of racism as well as dealing with sexism. Slave women in these plantations assumed roles within the family as well as the community; these roles were completely different to the roles given to a traditional white female. Deborah Gray White shows us how black women had a different experience from the black men and the struggle they had to maintain their sense of womanhood against all odds, resist sexual oppression, and keep their families together. In the book the author describes two different types of women, “Jezebel” and “Mammy” they
Skeeter Phelan is an aspiring writer who wants to tell the stories of underpaid, overworked, and underestimated black maids while sacrificing her own “friendships” to bring a big change to the world of writing and an even bigger change to the lives of her subjects. Skeeter brings light and hope into the dark story of The Help and gives the reader a new perspective of how common stereotypes were in Mississippi during the 1960s. Born to Carlton and Charlotte Phelan and raised by a black maid named Constantine, Skeeter grew up on her family’s cotton plantation as the oddball of the family. Constantine was the closest thing Skeeter had to a loving mother. What was most memorable about their relationship was when Skeeter recalls, “All my life I’d been told what to believe about politics, colored, being a girl.
No matter how messed up, annoying, or just plain out crazy your family is, at the end of the day they’re still your family and you love them. In the book The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, you will learn and read about a very dysfunctional family. Throughout Jeanette’s childhood she went through constant struggles. From catching on fire trying to cook herself a hog dogs when she was 3, to moving over 20 times throughout the years while her parents struggled to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table. Jeanette shows us that despite bad parenting, a child can still become resilient.
Throughout the book, the two themes that kept appearing were racism and gender and the home. Eugenia Skeeter Phelan is a young lady that loves to write and does not like how African Americans are treated so she writes about that topic. During the book, Eugenia Skeeter Phelan’s name gets shortened to just Skeeter. Skeeter is a white female that is part of the Bridge Club and just sits back and disagrees with what they are talking about. Skeeter said, “I listen to my friends say ignorant, racist things and I can’t even open my mouth” ( Stockett 182).
Skeeter became capable of fully seeing the prejudice and unfair treatment of the maids after she was socially isolated from society. To Skeeter’s friends, coloreds were supposed to be treated this way, because they were supposedly lesser than whites. However, as stated by Michael Bassey Johnson, “To be of good quality, you must first excuse yourself from the presence of shallow and callow minded individuals.” Even though Skeeter’s views were unpopular, her ability to share insight on the life of being a colored maid during the 1960’s helped spread awareness of the errors of
By an anonymous writer later revealed as Skeeter also known as Eugenia Phelan. Skeeter, a white woman, returns to her hometown (Mississippi) to discover that her motherly nanny Constantine has left but no one tells what happened. Soon Skeeter realizes the injustice her society practices and decides to write a book where voices of black will be raised. She approaches Aibileen for sharing her narrative to which Aibileen responds positively and also let’s Minny in their secret. Minny, Aibileen’s friend, another black help, reveals a secret about Miss Hilly that ensures Miss Hilly’s silence after the publication of their writing project.
She battles to free herself from the power that white Americans hold over her and her community during this time. With the help of a few fellow maids and Miss Skeeter, the white women who sparked the question of change, Aibileen hopes to change people’s opinions about how they perceive blacks
Skeeter is seen to develop in two different ways: a young woman who doesn 't have marriage as a first priority anymore and a woman who later sees an injustice to the black help. Skeeter is a white socialite who just graduated from college with a degree in writing. She came back to Jackson Mississippi with the idea of starting to write for book publishing companies but arrives home only for her mother to question her about marriage. Upon the many
The Help, a book written by Kathryn Stockett, focused on the fight to overcome racial segregation with the emersion of Civil Rights following slavery in the 1960s. This book showed the hardships black house workers went through pertaining to their personal lives as housemaids for White families. “The help”, as they were called by the white folks, followed in their ancestor’s footsteps and remained loyal to their White families because it was all they knew how to do. Even if they wanted a different job, they were still stuck in the same job because of lack of education, economic issues, and social interactions. When girls grew up in 1962, most of them did not have a strong education.
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.
Throughout the movie, the white women generally would stay at home and complete tasks and hobbies that they enjoyed participating. Usually assuming the roles of childbearing, many white women did not have a place within the working community. For years, a woman who pursued her education was seen as a threat. Although very few women went against these stereotypical roles, Eugenia ‘Skeeter’ Phelan became one of those exceptions. Graduating from college and pursuing a stable writing career Skeeter became both disliked and feared by many of the women within Jackson, Mississippi.
In the novel The Help, Stockett writes about the lives of the African American women working for the prominent white families and the trial and tribulations that they have encountered. The African American women are the people who are taking care of the white families home and children while being disrespected and unappreciated by their boss. “I’d like to write this showing the point of view of the help. The colored women down here.' I tried to picture Constantine's face, Aibileen's. '
A young college graduate, Skeeter, returns home to be with her ailing mother, and in her ambition to succeed as a writer, turns to the black maids she knows. Skeeter is determined to collect their oral histories and write about a culture that values social facade and ignores the human dignity of many members of the community. Two maids, Aibileen and Minny, agree to share their stories, stories of struggle and daily humiliation, of hard work and low pay, of fear for themselves. It is a time of change, when
