What is a Maid? A Part of The Family, or a Person Employed By Your Family?

What is a maid? An employee hired by your family, always staying an arms length away never allowed to get too close and always acting professionally. Or a part of the family; someone who makes you lemonade, and plays with your kids.

Skeeter Phelan, always thought of her maid Constantine as a friend. Like a mother to her, Constantine was her best friend, someone she could always turn too. She loved Constantine, she thought of her as part of the family; loving an caring like a mother, calm and collected like a father and always playful and fun like sibling. Unlike Skeeter, her friend, Hilly didn't see the relationship between a maid and the employer and the employers family the same way.

Hilly's ideas of a maid was an employee who was always professional, got the job done and then left. They were never allowed to close, so that they wouldn't become attached. Because hilly went through maids like she went through tooth paste. Skeeter really didn't understand why, she went through so many different maids. They all seemed to do their job well, never talked back and always took care of the children. Hilly had the idea that a maid a lesser person, not equal to her. She assumed that if you were cleaning homes for a living, you definitely did not have the same social status the person you were cleaning for. Worst of all, she thought that the only people low enough on the social ladder to be cleaning houses were the coloured people.

Hilly, thinking the coloured maids were less human than the rest of us, initiated the “ home help sanitation initiative,” A disease preventing measure. Low-cost bathroom installations in your garage or shed, for homes without such an important fixture, for the help. To prevent the coloured people from contaminating the white comes with their germs. Now skeeter didn't see the point in this, she had lived with Constantine almost all her life an never had a disease brought into her home form her. And what made Hilly think that because their skin was a different colour that they were the one's bringing in germs?

Skeeter has always had a passion for writing, she wants to become a journalist and over the last few weeks she has been home, she has finally found the topic for her novel that will be her ticket into the world of writing. The life of maids in Jackson Mississippi. Their stories, their experiences and their hardship all recorded in one book. To show the world what their lives are like. A way for the world to know the work these women do and have done and the treatment they receive from the families that they work for. Skeeter never saw the treatment of the maids in Jackson the way it, was because of the way she treated Constantine. With love and kindness, she now knows the truth about the life of a maid and what their work has been like.