cliffsnotes on stockett's the help library edition kathryn stockett

Seemingly as different from one another as can be, these women will nonetheless come together for a clandestine project that will put them all at risk. Minny finally finds a position working for someone too new to town to know her reputation. She can cook like nobody's business, but she can't mind her tongue, so she's lost yet another job. Minny, Aibileen's best friend, is short, fat, and perhaps the sassiest woman in Mississippi. She is devoted to the little girl she looks after, though she knows both their hearts may be broken. Something has shifted inside her after the loss of her own son, who died while his bosses looked the other way. Skeeter would normally find solace with her beloved maid Constantine, the woman who raised her, but Constantine has disappeared and no one will tell Skeeter where she has gone.Īibileen is a black maid, a wise, regal woman raising her seventeenth white child.

She may have a degree, but it is 1962, Mississippi, and her mother will not be happy till Skeeter has a ring on her finger.

Twenty-two-year-old Skeeter has just returned home after graduating from Ole Miss. Near the end of the book, Stockett mentions the passing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.Three ordinary women are about to take one extraordinary step. But the novel ends with the hope for progress. Stockett focuses on one particular low point in the civil rights movement: the violent murder of the black activist Medgar Evers by a pro-segregation white man. In the early sixties, if a black man used a white bathroom, he could expect white men to burn down his house, beat him, or even lynch him.

However, the majority of white Southerners opposed these changes, with some people even resorting to violence to maintain segregation. Civil rights protestors sought to dissolve “the color line,” a metaphor for segregation, by integrating the facilities and institutions that were kept separate. White and black people had separate hospitals, bathrooms, schools, and even graveyards. Set in Jackson, Mississippi during the early days of the 1960s civil rights movement, The Help portrays social life under the Jim Crow-era laws that enforced racial segregation.

Cliffsnotes on stockett's the help library edition kathryn stockett