White Families In John Steinbeck's The Help

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It takes a giant step for everybody to accept and move on from something that could disrupt their everyday life. The society in the 1960s was very unstable with racial tensions of violence, gender inequality, the Vietnam War and the assassinations of influential leaders. Despite every person’s differences and background one thing that created division in the South during the 1960s were people’s unwillingness to change. The Help depicts white families in the town of Jackson, Mississippi to stick to their roots and follow the lifestyle of their mothers and grandmothers. To fit the ideal style they are to maintain the divide between white and blacks by treating them like they are much less than themselves. Even the African Americans are so use …show more content…
Minny and Aibileen have to tend to white families as a way to make money and give their families the basic needs. The white families had them do their basic chores around the house, cook, clean and raise their children because they most were busy keeping their social lives in check. The African Americans dislike toward white families would grow with every little thing that they would tell them to do while not letting them use the same bathrooms, sit at the same table or live in the same neighborhood. Aibileen would come home from a long day and think, “I spend all day long tending to white people's. I don’t need them looking in on me at home” (101). Both whites and blacks attitudes toward each other are so strong that it is hard to see hope for advancement in a less separated society. Even if they do want change it is hard to accept that they will be equal after being told what to do under white families for so long. Most of the families in town go about their daily lives without really examining what is wrong with the way they are living and treating people the same as them, just a different color skin. Skeeter as a writer finally examines and sees how much of divide their is between the two. She realizes that “the colored part of town seems so far away when, evidently it’s only a few miles from the white part of town” (143). The
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