Abstract
The recently released film, The Help, based on Kathryn Stockett’s best-selling novel, foregrounds domestic service in the American imagination. Both the film and the novel have been met with both praise and criticism. The story is set in 1963 Mississippi during the era of Jim Crow laws and the rising Civil Rights Movement. Skeeter, an aspiring writer and naive young white women, is the center of the story. Uncomfortable with the racist treatment of African American women hired as maids in her family and friends’ homes, she confronts the racism of white Mississippians indirectly by writing a book on domestic workers’ experiences of racism and abuse in white employers’ homes. One of the central tensions in the story is the danger Skeeter places these maids in as a result of telling their stories. In the end, she triumphs as a hero by exposing the cruelty of Jim Crow laws and white employers’ attitudes and prejudices and lands a coveted journalism job in New York City.
Mainstream Images of the Help
People who can afford to hire domestic help usually worry more about finding “good help” than how to be good to the help. When the needs of the employee do play a prominent role, it is usually portrayed through a lens intended to cater to the popular imaginary, in books such as: The Nanny Diaries; Nanny Returns; You’ll Never Nanny in This Town Again; and A Butler’s Life, Scenes From the Other Side of the Silver Salver, all of which offer readers tantalizing accounts of life inside the mansions of the rich and famous.
Domestic workers are frequently depicted as subjects in scandals covered in television reports, newspapers and magazine articles. This coverage, which is also focused on the lives of the rich and powerful, has brought increased attention to the existence of these workers, but not necessarily to their working conditions. The term “Nannygate” was coined when several of President Clinton’s nominations for Attorney General were reported to have hired undocumented immigrant women. The Bush administration ran into a similar “Nannygate” problem with the nomination of Linda Chavez for Secretary of Labor. Chavez claimed that her paid arrangement with an undocumented Guatemalan woman who did her laundry, cleaned her kitchen, picked up after her adolescent sons, and took care of her dogs, was payment for work was an act of charity and compassion. More recently, Timothy Geithner was removed from consideration for the Treasury Department in the Obama administration because a former housekeeper lacked legal documentation. These events have sparked “Nannygate” debates, but the focus on this “servant problem” continues to the needs and rights of the employer rather than the plight of domestic workers, who in some cases are quickly deported once their status is discovered.
Two recent stories about domestic workers emerged over the last year and received extensive news coverage. In May, the former International Monetary Fund chief, Dominique-Strauss Kahn was accused of sexually assaulting Ms. Diallo, a 32-year-old hotel housekeeper at the Sofitel Hotel in New York. A few days later, Arnold Schwarzenegger publicly acknowledged that he had fathered a 14-year-old son, Joseph Baena, with the family maid, Mildred Patricia Baena, who had worked for the family for 20 years. Needless to say, this was not the first time a national figure was revealed to have fathered a child with women employed as a household worker. After his death in 2003, news broke that former Governor of South Carolina Strom Thurmond fathered a child with his family’s 16-year-old, African-American maid, Carrie Butler, when he was twenty-two. Like Schwarzenegger, Thurmond had not publically acknowledged his child, but did provide support—perhaps to avoid scandal. While these sensational stories fill front pages of the major newspapers as well as the tabloids, the same media do little to cover the ongoing labor struggles of domestic workers nationally or internationally.
Hollywood’s depiction of domestic work: definitely not the real deal.
©2011 DreamWorks II Distribution Co., LLC
Given this media orientation, it is little wonder that The Help received such popular acclaim, and that relatively little attention has been paid to the criticism of both the book and the film. One widely circulated attack has been “An Open Statement to the Fans of The Help” issued by the Association of Black Women Historians. This statement critiques The Help for the “Mammy” representation of African American Women, the misrepresentation of African American speech and culture, negative images of black masculinity and manhood, and for the failure to depict the realities of sexual harassment and physical abuse in domestic service. Despite these critiques, for the most part, the representation of domestic workers and their experiences, both in popular culture and in the news scandals, suggests that we are living in a “post-racial era” and that maids and nannies are a thing of the past. This is probably not surprising since domestic workers are rarely included in research or policy studies on employment in the United States. Moreover, the Federal Fair Labor Standards Act does not cover domestic workers and most states do not include them in their Occupational, Safety and Health Administration.
Realistic Recognition
The tabloid coverage of Schwarzenegger’s pending divorce, the Dominique-Strauss Kahn rape case, and the grand opening of the movie, The Help, completely overshadows the reality of the 2.5 million domestic workers in the United States. However, these working women are making strides toward more realistic recognition. In June 2011, the “International Labour Conference in Geneva” adopted “The First Convention and Recommendation on Decent Work for Domestic Workers.” This convention is a significant victory in affirming rights for an estimated 100 million domestic workers in the global economy. A year earlier, as the result of a six-year struggle, the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA) celebrated the passage of the New York Domestic Workers Bill of Rights. This bill assures an eight-hour work day, an overtime rate established for both live-in and day workers, a day off, entitlement to three paid days off annually, and protection against discrimination and sexual harassment. Workers are campaigning for a similar bill in California and other states.
Ashley R. Guillory
Rather than directly confront the nostalgia of noblesse oblige depicted in The Help, the National Domestic Workers Alliance is using the popularity of the novel and film as an opportunity to educate the public about the immigrant women employed by families across the country. This educational campaign makes it clear that the working conditions and racism that arouse the emotional responses of readers and viewers of The Help are present and ongoing. A three-minute YouTube video, “Meet ‘Today’s Help’” (youtube.com/watch?v=-RyEGeZmAn8) begins by describing the movie as “a courageous story about domestic workers during the Civil Rights Era.” The video introduces the dignity in caring for children and the elderly and then portrays a wide range of immigrant women working as domestics. Unlike the film, none of the women introducing themselves are stereotyped mammies in uniform, but they do remind the viewer that their working conditions have changed little over the past 50 years. Domestic workers are still not covered by labor laws, they continue to work long hours for low wages, and are frequently cheated out of wages. While these workers are eligible for state minimum wage, there is little oversight or enforcement. They are still denied numerous protections that other workers, including their employers, take for granted—overtime, workers’ compensation, control over the working day, and meal breaks. The video concludes by highlighting the successes of organizing and the need to fight for the passage of a Domestic Workers Bill of Rights throughout the country.
People usually worry more about finding “good help” than how to be good to the help.
Recently NDWA began a new Twitter campaign, #BeTheHelp with the slogan, “It takes a village to make a change.” “#BeTheHelp is a campaign created to give everyone who has been moved by the motion picture The Help a way to be a part of improving the lives and working conditions of domestic workers” (domesticworkers.org/campaigns). This new campaign uses Facebook and other social media to build public support to pass a Domestic Workers Bill of Rights in every state. Unlike their initial video, there are no images taken from the film, The Help. Instead they take an activist-educational approach that highlights the labor involved in help and caretaking. The video introduces us to an organizer, three caretakers, and an adolescent who expresses his gratitude for his nanny’s work. Similar projects telling stories of contemporary domestic workers are springing up on the internet (Voices of the Help: Domestic Workers Tell Their Story at indyweek.com/indyweek/voices-of-the-help-domestic-workers-tell-their-stories/Content?oid=2740745). These stories tell of fears of retaliation for complaining about sexual harassment, long hours, exposure to dangerous cleaning chemicals, and low wages or the lack of benefits. Workers who are undocumented face regulation similar to Jim Crow laws that restrict their movement, deny them access to health care, government identification such as a driver’s license, and in some states even the right to rent housing or send their children to school.
It is unlikely that The Help was written with the goal of educating employers about the plight of domestic workers. Author Kathryn Stockett’s refusal to settle a lawsuit with Ablene Cooper for a mere $75,000 for using “her name and likeness” in the book, strongly suggests her lack of compassion for the real help. In contrast, the media efforts of the National Domestic Workers Alliance appropriates this “feel good” story about race and inequality in order to reposition domestic workers at the center of the story and to recognize the fullness of their experiences.