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The Help essay draft

Laura Ojeda

English advanced 9th

Prof. Burnett

September 1, 2021

Skeeter Phelan

The Help is a novel that tells the stories of black maids working in white homes in

Jackson, Mississippi during the 1960s. The story is narrated by three women from their

respective points of view. One of the main protagonist and narrator we meet is Skeeter Phelan.

Her real name is Eugenia, but her brother gave her the nickname “Skeeter” when she was a

baby and it stuck. She is an aspiring journalist who lives with her parents in her childhood home

in their cotton plantation. Skeeter went to Ole Miss University and was the only one of her

friends to not drop out of the University to get married. Instead, she graduated and went back

home, only to find that the woman that raised her had been fired. When Skeeter was young,

her family’s maid was a black woman named Constantine. When she saw that Constantine

wasn’t there, she started to realize something was wrong; “I stared down at my college trunks,

terrified by the thought of unpacking here. The house felt vast, empty.” (Stockett 81)

Skeeter’s dream was to be a writer, so she applied for a position with editor Elaine Stein

in New York. She was tired of sitting at home all day dealing with her mothers’ criticism, but

Elaine didn’t hire her since she didn’t have work experience. Taking Elaine’s advice, she got a

job at the newspaper writing the Miss Myrna column, which was about housekeeping. But of

course, she didn’t know anything about cleaning houses, so she got help from her friend’s maid,
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Aibileen. As they continued talking, Aibileen started to open up about her dead son, Treelore,

and how he wanted to write a book about what it was like to work for a white man. Skeeter

then gets the idea to write a book but from the maid’s perspective about what it was like to

work for a white family after starting to be aware of her role in her segregated community. She

then sent a letter to Elaine Stein about it, and she told Skeeter that she’d need at least a dozen

maids to interview for the book to work. It took a lot of convincing, but Aibileen agreed, and

eventually she got Skeeter more than twelve other maids who were willing to share their

stories.

Another reason Skeeter had for writing the book was to prove her mother wrong.

Skeeter’s mother was a very stubborn woman who wanted her daughter to settle down. She

thought her daughter shouldn’t be worrying about getting a job, and instead just get married

and have kids. Skeeter was tired of these sexist ideas society had for women, which gave her

more motivation to write the book. She once told her mother “would it really be so terrible if I

never met a husband?” (Stockett 66). Skeeter also started to notice how badly her white friends

acted towards their black maids. For example, she thought making the help use a different

bathroom was a waste of time and money, or how they accused the maids of stealing their

silver. At the library she saw a book with the n-word written in it in a 3 rd grader’s handwriting.

Seeing how these racist ideas were taught to kids at such a young age gave her even more

motivation. Later she also read the book of Jim Crow laws and realized how absurd all the

segregation laws were.

Skeeter’s desire for giving these women’s experiences a voice also came from wanting

to stop the misbeliefs that justified the abuse that black people endured. Some other reasons
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she had were showing her love for Constantine and trying to give the maids a better life after

speaking their truths. After finishing all the interviews and editing them together, she sent the

book to Elaine Stein, and it ended up getting published. Hilly was the first to realize the book

was about Jackson and she went around telling everyone to fire their maids. One day in the

drugstore a woman called Lou Anne told Skeeter about what Hilly was doing and how she

wouldn’t fire her maid. It was then that Skeeter realized she had completely forgotten the main

point of the book; “Wasn’t that the point of the book? For women to realize, We are just two

people. Not that much separates us. Not nearly as much as I’d thought. But Lou Anne, she

understood the point of the book before she ever read it. The one who was missing the point

this time was me.” (Stockett 491).

Skeeter was a very individualistic, kind, and smart woman who was constantly looking

for the truth. Some of the other reasons Skeeter had for writing Help was to show her love to

the woman that raised her, prove her family wrong, and go against the sexist and racist ideas

that society had. Throughout the novel she becomes alienated from her community and starts

to develop her own opinions about things. At the end of the novel, she gets a job in New York

and leaves Aibileen her old job of writing the Miss Myrna column. The book made the people of

Jackson reconsider the reasons for the barriers that existed between black and white people

and to hopefully, see beyond them and eventually tear them down.
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Works cited

Stockett, Kathryn. The Help. Penguin Books 2011.