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Male Roles In The Movie The Help, By Kathryn Stockett

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The Help, based on the best-selling novel by Kathryn Stockett, is a film about race and class relations in Jackson, Mississippi in the early 1960s. A century after the American Civil War, African-American women had few options but to work as exploited house slaves for wealthy white families. The main dynamic of the movie is it explores the unequal treatment suffered by the “Hired help” at the hands of their white, middle class oppressors.
The “World Socialists” article states that the movie and book, The Help ignore the civil acts movement. “One of the most jarring elements is the absence of any reference to the mass struggles that shattered the Jim Crow structure in the South at the time, or any indication of their influence and atmosphere.” …show more content…

One is, Skeeter Phelan; another is Hilly Holbrook, the racist “Queen Bee”; Elizabeth Leefolt, Holbrook’s lapdog; Celia Foote, a bubbly Marilyn Monroe type; and Skeeter’s mother, Charlotte, the quintessential Southern mother. The Help uses Hilly Holbrook’s character, played by Bryce Dallas Howard, as “ The vehicle through which all racism and intolerance are enacted.” (The Huffington Post) The other woman, minus Skeeter and Celia, are so overcome by desires for acceptance from Hilly that they do not speak out about her need to terrorize “the help.” As Hilly pushes for white families to build separate bathrooms for their Black maids because “they carry different diseases” than white people, despite those Black people cooking their food, cleaning their houses, and taking care of their own children, and her fellow bridge club members, awkwardly avert their eyes instead of speaking out. It’s obvious in the movie that they don’t agree with Hilly, but they go along with it so they don’t upset their queen bee, and Hilly uses this to her own advantage, exploiting her own friends to go along with her ideas. But yet these Women, just like their husbands, are not to be judged as prejudiced, and racist against the Black citizens of Jackson. Instead, they are going along with simply how things are, which we are led to believe is not their own fault. The Help” demonstrates the struggles for equality for, not only women but black women as well (www.wstudies) “For the women in “The Help” the struggles are obvious and society would be foolish to say that equal opportunities are characteristic in the realities of our modern

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