This movie is set in 1960s Jackson, Mississippi and tells the story of an aspiring young Southern journalist who wants to tell what it is like to work as a housemaid/domestic helper from the black woman's perspective. Skeeter, whose friends are busy spending their days in a privileged world of playing bridge, serving in the Junior League, and entertaining, wants nothing more than to gain experience as a writer so she can go to New York and work for a large publishing company. Skeeter's friends are married and living in their perfect world of owning the right house, in the right neighborhood, having babies, and depending on their black maids to do the work of raising their children, cleaning their homes, doing their shopping and cooking their meals. Skeeter doesn't date or have a boyfriend; her goal is to become a writer, which is an embarrassment to her mother, and scandalous to her friends. Despite the times, Skeeter has a deep sense of how wrong the blacks are treated and she is both liked and respected by those who work for her own family as well as those who work for her friends. This is not the case with the snobby Miss Hilly and Miss Elizabeth, who both view their maids as less than human because they are black. Miss Hilly draws up an initiative to require all households who employ black help to build a special toilet for them because "they carry different diseases from us". This was a time when blacks were prohibited from using the same public toilets as whites, and were also forbidden from drinking from the same water fountain, as well as many other discriminatory practices that made Mississippi such a shameful bastion of racial segregation and discrimination.
Aibileen and Minnie are the two maids that work for Miss Elizabeth and Miss Hilly, and are best friends who share their personal sorrows with each other. After Miss Hilly catches Minnie in her bathroom during a violent thunderstorm that prevents her from going outside to use the toilet, she fires Minnie and spreads lies that will insure Minnie is unable to find employment anywhere else in town. Aibileen tells Minnie that Celia Foote, an outcast from Hilly's social circle, and the woman who is married to Hilly's past boyfriend, is looking for help. Minnie, desperate for a job to support her children, swallows her pride and goes to work for Celia. It turns out Celia lives in a huge old mansion that her husband's family have owned for generations. She is a simple and sweet girl raised on the wrong side of the tracks who wants nothing more than to find a place in the world her husband was born into. She accepts Minnie as an equal, something that immediately raises Minnie's suspicions because of the prevailing racial prejudices in the Deep South against blacks. Both of them being outcasts from the circle of the Miss Hilly's world, and with reputations that are tarnished by Miss Hilly, they forge a bond slowly that will benefit them both in unique ways.
Aibileen is approached by Skeeter to tell what it is like to work as a maid and, although at first resistant to the idea, she reluctantly begins to open up about the things she has experienced over many years working in the homes of white women and raising their children. It is a dangerous thing for both Skeeter and Aibileen in the climate of racial prejudice that exists, and they must keep their project secret. Skeeter has promised that she will never use Aibileen's real name, nor her own as the writer, and encourages Aibileen to see if Minnie might be willing to also tell of her perspective as to what it has been like to work as a maid for white families. Minnie is bitter over what she has suffered at the hands of the cruel Hilly, and grudgingly agrees to share as long as her name isn't used. Before long their trust in Skeeter and the years of resentment they have felt over their treatment leads Aibileen and Minnie to give up the secrets of the white women of Jackson as Skeeter sympathetically listens and pens their stories for a book titled "The Help".
Minnie's desire to get revenge on Hilly leads her to carry out an act she calls "the terrible awful", something that is so outrageous that she is ashamed to ever tell anyone what she has done. It also is hilarious, and Hilly's slightly senile and forgetful mother witnesses it and laughs uproariously at Minnie's revenge, but this leads Hilly to put her mother in a nursing home because she is afraid she will tell everyone in town what happened and make her the laughing stock of Jackson. Eventually when racial tensions and injustices, including the murder of Medgar Evers, lead to the brutal treatment of one of the maids in Jackson, it serves as the catalyst that encourages the other maids of Jackson to open up to Skeeter about the way they have been treated over the years while working for white families, and they agree to spill their secrets, some of which are terribly sad, some of which are bittersweet, some of which are hilarious, and some of which are damning for the white families. Minnie tells Aibileen about "the terrible awful" she did to Miss Hilly and each maid knows that they have "insurance" to protect them since Miss Hilly would never let anyone believe the stories are set in Jackson once they are published, because Minnie's story of "the terrible awful", which is included in the many stories that will come to be told in "The Help", would make Hilly the joke of Jackson if anyone ever knew what Minnie did to her. As their stories are written, Skeeter prepares to include her own story of Constantine, the black maid who raised her from infancy, and how Skeeter's mother betrayed the loyalty and love Constantine had for the Phelan family, especially for Skeeter.
Once finished and sent off to the publishing house in New York, the manuscript is hastily published to coincide with Dr. Martin Luther King's march on Washington, something that will bring the civil rights movement to the forefront of America as the struggle for racial equality tears at the fabric of the Old South, revealing the humiliating treatment of blacks which has been kept largely untold in other parts of the country.
Skeeter's book comes at a time ripe for the telling. Once it hits stores in Jackson, everyone is buying it and wondering where the stories were originated because they seem to divulge things that fit with events among Jackson's white families although no mention is made of the author (simply "anonymous") or the town where the stories took place. As more and more interest in the book develops, Hilly buys it and when she reads about "the terrible awful" she knows Skeeter has written the book, but she tells everyone the book can't possibly be about Jackson. She confronts Skeeter about the book but Skeeter stands her ground and tells Hilly she can't prove anything, and Hilly can't - unless she wants to make herself and every other white family in her social circle look bad and expose the secrets which they had assumed would always be safe in the climate of white superiority, where the lives of their black maids could be ruined for the slightest reason. Now everything has changed and the tables have turned!
Finally, Celia Foote decides to make an appearance at the annual Christmas Junior League gala so she can tell Miss Hilly that she never stole away her old boyfriend, because she believes this is why Miss Hilly hates her and has deliberately excluded her from being in the Junior League and the circle of wealthy white women that form Hilly and Elizabeth's coterie of friends. Little does she realize that she is about to make herself look like a fool among the snobby women of Jackson, even though she is married to the influential son of an old monied family. She is also about to discover that she will never be accepted, even if she tries to tell Hilly of her innocence in Hilly's breakup with Johnny. Although it makes for a sad and yet funny scene, the wheels are set in motion for everything to change as the The Help's stories circulate among Jackson's citizens and expose the terrible secrets and the injustices toward blacks that have been buried in secrecy for so long
Throughout the movie are moments of extreme hilarity and moments of great sadness as the story unfolds, but the ending is one that provides redemption for Skeeter, Aibileen, Minnie, and even Celia Foote. The strength and empowerment that comes to those who have never known anything but powerlessness is the redemption, and the beginning of hope for a better life in the changing times of the civil rights movement.
Having grown up as a white child in the South during the time this story takes place, I remember so vividly how racial segregation was - the signs that separated the use of public facilities for blacks and whites, as well as a time when blacks were not allowed to ride anywhere except the back of buses. It is a time that is burned into my mind and makes me deeply ashamed of the degrading treatment blacks suffered at the hands of whites. Even as a child, I remember the downcast eyes and the role of subservience that defined how blacks were expected to behave in the presence of whites. There is no exaggeration in this book as to the black experience in the Deep South. The ending of the movie was so uplifting as I'm The Living Proof is sung by Mary J. Blige! It is simply a marvelous movie. I highly recommend it!