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Discrimination of african american women in the workplace
Discrimination of african american women in the workplace
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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
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
To most of her neighbors, women went to college to find a husband, not get a degree. When Skeeter began writing The Help, she and the maids faced the threat of arrest or worse for what they were writing (Taylor). This scares her, but also makes her all the more determined to write what people have been hiding. Skeeter believes in writing the truth, even if it is not what people want to hear. She realizes how theses laws restrict anyone who supports blacks and wants to tell the truth of how they are treated.
She is strong, curious, independent and self-confident. Many trials throughout the book test her strength and independence but she overcomes. She recognizes as she gets older and gains more experience that there is a double standard for men and women. “The slave system defined black people as chattel. Since women no less than men were viewed as profitable labor units, they might as well have been genderless as far as slave holders were concerned” (Davis 5)
Skeeter also wishes to expose the injustice that the African Americans faced in the South. Many of the Southerns, including her friends, oppose this dream, and this conflict leads Skeeter to be hated by many white Southerners. Eventually, even her suitor and her friends leave
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.
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
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
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.
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.
