According to human geographer Yi Fu Tuan, place is humanized space. Place is an “abstract world made real through the investment of emotion and attribution of meaning” (Jackson 199). The 2011 movie “The Help,” embodies Tuan’s theory, showing that the same space can exist as completely different places for different people. By focusing in on the private lives and households of citizens living in 1960’s Jackson, Mississippi, “The Help” offers its audience a snapshot of domestic work as experienced by women during the Civil Rights movement in the American South.
The Jim Crow South provided very little work opportunities for women, white or black. For the privileged, men provided the money for the house while women were left to cook, clean, and tend to social events. This way of thinking pervaded the social norms of the wealthy and is exemplified at the household level. During the day, the man left the home and went to work, leaving the space he left to his wife, his children (if any) and a maid. The movie is shown at this scale because it provides a nice platform to view how racism affected the domestic work place in the 1960s. It allows its audience to see how racially driven power relations between the housewife and the maid existed in this microcosm of domestic work in the midst of a fundamentally divided, sexist world.
Southern white women of privilege in the 1960s were not supposed to work at all. As culture dictated, the main responsibility of these women was to supervise ‘the help,’ or their black maid. In several instances, different white women of privilege in the movie scoff at the idea that another white woman of privilege wanted to get a job. Twelve minutes into “The Help,” the main character, Skeeter, tells a fellow member on the Junior Board that she received a job offer from the newspaper, The Jackson Journal, and is met with the prickly remark, “last stop before marriage.” Twenty minutes into the film, Skeeter tells her mother of her new job. Her mother replies, “Your eggs are dying; Would it kill you to go on a date?” Even as a privileged white woman, Skeeter received zero support from the other privileged white women when she expressed her excitement to enter the workforce. “The Help” makes it clear that many women in this microcosm were content to perpetuate this socially constructed perception of what a woman’s relationship with the workplace should be.
Paradoxically, these same white women who were not supposed to work according to social custom were desperate for help. For this reason, these white women all had black maids to do the domestic work necessary for a family to survive. On average these maids earned less than a dollar per hour or around $180 per month and were required to do all of the housework. One of the maids who shared her story in the movie expressed how many maids felt trapped once they were hired by a family. Speaking of the societal understanding regarding maids, in minute 92 of the movie she claims “In everybody’s mind, the French family and Ms. Joleen owned me. Owned me.” As Tuan suggested, the living room of a suburban Jackson townhouse in the 60’s existed as completely different places for the housewife and the maid, split by a racially tainted workplace.
In addition to the regular cleaning and cooking, the maids also raised many of the families’ children. The main maid in the movie, Ms. Aibileen Clark, stated that she had raised 17 white babies in her lifetime. While working on less than a dollar an hour to raise those white babies, she was sacrificing the time she could have been spending with her own children. When Skeeter asked Ms. Clark what that feels like, the viewer is left with only a facial expression of a deep sadness. Her emotion slices through the sickening racial structure of the 1960’s South that allowed her to raise a white child but didn’t allow her to use the bathroom inside the house. “The Help” explores this aspect of human geography in the workplace in a little more detail when the leading racist character Hilly Holbrook claims with conviction that black people “carry different diseases than we do” but then finds it perfectly normal to trust the same women (with the same diseases) to raise the children, the most vulnerable and precious part of society.
The Junior Board depicted in “The Help” spent their time working to host the “Annual African Children’s Ball” in order to feed hungry African children. As Hilly Holbrook shares the success of their work, she claims that the group’s initiative to feed hungry Africans is a cause ‘dear to the hearts of the help.’ Her insensitive remark echoes geographer Danny Dorling’s work on social and spatial inequalities that demonstrates: “we can sometimes be stirred to care for distant strangers more readily than we can be to express concern for the inequalities that exist almost literally on our doorstep” (Jackson 200). According to “The Help,” the privileged women of Jackson in the 1960s. would perpetuate workplace inequalities in their own homes while spending their time working to spend their money feeding people in a far off land.
It is hard not to see the paradox existing in domestic life of the American South in the 1960s. Inside the confines of the woman’s role in the family the attitude toward work was not one of respect but one of necessity, skewed and twisted by racist traditions. Furthermore, perceptions about social status created a vicious cycle for the Jim Crow South to exist. Unfortunately the South lived under this premise for nearly a hundred years after the Civil War for traditions become entrenched when perceptions about a space create a place. “The Help” depicts 1960s Jackson, MS with societal norms created out of a fundamentally flawed yet self perpetuating culture. Inside that microcosm of life in the privileged Southern household, the implications of a troubled domestic workplace trickled across regional social classes and through age gaps. All women in that time and place existed within a culturally dictated structure, urged to spend their time working in the house. “The Help” shows this domestic work and how the strong socially constructed frameworks in the 1960’s American South shaped and molded the domestic workplace environment for its women.
Jackson, Peter. Thinking Geographically. Volume 91 (3). Pages 199-200. Published in 2006.
The Help. Dir. Tate Taylor. Touchstone Home Entertainment, 2011.