The Help is a thought-provoking novel that teaches readers what it was like as a black woman during the Civil Rights Movement. Miss Skeeter, the main character, writes a compilation of perspectives of black maids working in white homes. The town in which it takes place is one where racial tension has been heating up. All of the maids write their stories in secret to avoid unfortunate punishments for what they are writing about. They mostly write about how the white ladies treat them. In the novel readers notice how unfair punishments were for going against the beliefs of white people, how white ladies treated their black maids and how immoral racial segregation was back then. It is important to know how the novel is connected to the past. Readers …show more content…
One of the main white ladies, Hilly, is a nasty women that will do anything to put down her help. When her maid, Yule May, asks to borrow money, she says that she will not lend the money because it is only Christian to make her raise the money herself, and that she is “well and able”(shmoop.com). Since Hilly will not give her the money, Yule May steals a worthless ring to sell. When Hilly finds this out, she does everything she can to put Yule May in jail. This mistreatment of black maids translates into the real world. “During the 1960's, nearly ninety percent of black women in the South worked as domestic servants”(http://digital.library.louisville.edu/). Most black women in the 1960s just wanted to take care of their own children while their husbands worked, but they had to endure the unfair treatment of the white ladies that hired them. As pointed out in The Help, paid domestic workers were treated like property. The employers gave them low wages and poor working conditions. In some instances, the employers would be abusive. Even though the maids were taking care of the family like they were actually part of it, they wouldn’t be given the rights that treated them so. An example is that they weren’t allowed to sit at the dining table or use the same