One of the most-nominated films for this year’s Academy Awards (ceremony this Sunday!) is The Help, directed by Tate Taylor and adapted for the screen by Taylor and Kathrynn Stockett, from the latter’s mega-selling novel of the same name. The film is up for four awards, including Best Picture. A brief synopsis of the plot (via IMDB):
An aspiring author during the civil rights movement of the 1960s decides to write a book detailing the African-American maid's point of view on the white families for which they work, and the hardships they go through on a daily basis.
So, The Help is about race, never an easy subject for Hollywood blockbusters, regardless of literary pedigree. The Help’s tangled layering of a white woman (Stockett) telling the story of a white woman telling the story of black women has been a fairly obvious target for commentary. As has been the Academy’s embrace of the film. No one seems to question the worthiness of the nominated performances by the film’s African American stars Viola Davis (Actress in a Leading Role) or Octavia Spencer (Actress in a Supporting Role). The profession of their characters, however, has not escaped notice. From a NYT opinion piece by Brent Staples:
The troubling thing is that the only two black actors in this year’s Oscar competition are cast as domestics, and would probably not have found meaty, starring roles in other films had they passed on “The Help.” This brings to mind the first black Oscar winner, Hattie McDaniel, who received the award in 1940 for her portrayal of the loyal maid in “Gone With the Wind.” When criticized for often playing a mammy on film, Ms. McDaniel famously said she would rather play a maid in the movies than be one.
Staples’s argument is more about the racial politics of the film industry than about The Help itself, and Davis, for her part, has argued against this position, saying that “The black artist can only tell the truth about humanity, and humanity is messy.” Nevertheless, the film’s own presentation of race in the 1960s in the South has come in for widespread critique, including in a recent open statement from the Association of Black Women Historians (ABWH) to fans of The Help:
During the 1960s, the era covered in The Help, legal segregation and economic inequalities limited black women's employment opportunities. Up to 90 per cent of working black women in the South labored as domestic servants in white homes. The Help’s representation of these women is a disappointing resurrection of Mammy—a mythical stereotype of black women who were compelled, either by slavery or segregation, to serve white families. Portrayed as asexual, loyal, and contented caretakers of whites, the caricature of Mammy allowed mainstream America to ignore the systemic racism that bound black women to back-breaking, low paying jobs where employers routinely exploited them. The popularity of this most recent iteration is troubling because it reveals a contemporary nostalgia for the days when a black woman could only hope to clean the White House rather than reside in it.
The statement, which is careful to note the Association’s respect for the “stellar performances” of the film’s African American actresses, goes on to take issue with The Help’s lack of attention to civil rights activism and sexual harassment. While frequent exposure to risk of sexual harassment or assault would have been a fact of life for women like The Help’s characters, the film, the historians write, “makes light of black women’s fears and vulnerabilities, turning them into moments of comic relief.”
In a further effort to offer historical context, the statement includes a list of suggested reading. One of the recommended titles is Tera W. Hunter’s To ’Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War, which we published in the late 1990s. The book, praised by Drew Gilpin Faust, Nell Irvin Painter, Robin D. G. Kelley, Eric Foner, and many others, is a terrific study that has by now found its way into countless courses on Women’s Studies, African American Studies, Labor History, and American History. In the passage excerpted below, Hunter elaborates on the sexual abuse noted by the ABWH:
A black woman’s body, in slavery and freedom, was treated as though it were not her own, nor even the conventional prerogative of her father or spouse. White employers’ displays of disgust toward interracial contact in public in the age of segregation did not match their behavior in private. Black women were the victims of sexual abuse in their workplaces, yet they were accused of being the aggressors. (One particular) woman described how she lost a position after rebuking the seductions of her employer. Her own mate confronted the assailant and was arrested and fined $25 for disputing the word of a white man. The victim of the assault summarized the lesson she learned: “I was young then, and newly married, and didn’t know then what has been a burden to my mind and heart ever since: that a colored woman’s virtue in this part of the country has no protection.”
The book follows working women from their newfound optimism and hope at the end of the Civil War to their struggles as free domestic laborers in the homes of their former masters, opening what Foner calls a “new window on the study of emancipation and its aftermath.” U.S. History Scene, an education organization dedicated to providing history lovers, educators, and students with easy access to digital resources and scholarship, followed ABWH’s recommendation, and posted their take on Hunter’s book. Read their long and thoughtful examination of The Help’s relation to To ‘Joy My Freedom (which they call “social and cultural history at its strongest”) here.
UPDATE: To ‘Joy My Freedom’s relation to The Help was also noted on the blog of the Melissa Harris-Perry Show, along with another HUP title, Micki McElya’s Clinging to Mammy: The Faithful Slave in Twentieth-Century America. McElya was also a guest on Harris-Perry’s show for a segment on The Help that you can watch here.
