Aletta Blogt

Last week I saw the film “The Help” based on Kathryn Stockett’s novel with the same title. As you will probably know, or might have heard from someone who read one of the 5 million copies that have been sold worldwide or who watched the film, the story takes place in the 60s and is about a white girl from a Southern state in the USA, Skeeter. Skeeter, together with a number of black maids, writes a book about the experiences of working in white households. For the first time, the relation between white families and black maids is described from the perspective of black maids. The narrative unfolds against the background of the racial segregation of the time, the risks the maids take by speaking out and the suspicion that Skeeter has to overcome.

Critical Reviews
As I have not read the book, I can only recommend my colleague’s book review of October 2011 on this same website (see link below). Reading some other reviews also sheds light on how the film is seen as empowering and at the same time as disempowering. On the one hand, Frank Bruni, in his film review in the New York Times, speaks of “a story of female grit and solidarity — of strength through sisterhood.” He applauds the film for putting women centre stage: “What struck and pleased me most was the way “The Help” pushes back against a Hollywood tsunami of beach-season superheroes, sorcerers and simians [...] by putting women in the foreground. Also the midground. They monopolize the background, too.” On the other hand, Duchess Harris in her blog on the Feminist Wire website shows that the centring of women is in fact a centring of WHITE women: “The Help isn’t for Black women at all, and quickly devolves into just another novel by and for white women”.

From Book to Film
Why do I want to write about the film, while so much has been said about the book already? Because watching the film in the cinema meant that I was wondering how my fellow audience members experienced the film. Did they think the film was empowering? Did they think the film was feminist in that it addressed independence, violence against women, or the personal as a political issue? And, what I am most interested in: did they think it was a feel-good movie? I might have gotten this wrong, but I felt that watching the film, leaning back in our comfortable chairs, we convinced ourselves that this narrative was firmly situated in the past. And indeed, we don’t build separate toilets for black maids anymore to avoid them contaminating our white bathrooms. We do luckily live in a post-civil rights struggle era. But does that mean that unequal relationships between black and/or migrant domestic workers and white employers have seized to exist? How would we react when our cleaner asks us for an advance payment of her wage so she can send her son to university, as happens to one of the employers in the film? In short, can we sit back and relax or are there still enough reasons to move uncomfortably in our chairs when we reflect on the present persisting injustices against domestic workers?

Sara de Jong is researcher at Aletta, institute for women's history