The Help is set in the early 1960’s. Racism is abundant in this time period, and tensions between races are rising. John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. have yet to be assassinated. In the lazy town of Jackson, Mississippi, one of the most violent towns regarding class tensions, Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan is struggling to find herself under her mother’s high standards and pleas to get married. Skeeter is a writer, who wants to move to a big city and write for a magazine. Another main character is Aibileen Clark, an african-american maid who cleans the house of a snotty middle-class white woman, Hilly Holbrook. Aibileen is very good with children, and acts as the mother of Hilly’s three year old daugher, Mae Mobley. Hilly is a terrible parent, and is verbally abusive to her daughter, which disgusts Aibileen. The last main character is Minny Jackson, another maid, with a hot temper who has a hard time holding her tongue. After an incident that ruins her reputation with the “higher class” familys, Minny is afraid that she’ll never find work again, until a mysterious woman named Celia Foote moves to town, and offers to hire Minny. These three unlikely women come together to write a story exposing what “the help” really experience. All three women face different hardships according to their lifes, and from a friendship that is generally taboo. Each one makes immense sacrifices for the book they are writing, and experience racism and sexism to expose the stories that they want the world to know.