Follow up Post to Jocelyn 2/10

While reading the three articles for today on the black feminism movement I couldn’t help but think back to a book I read over winter break by Kathryn Stockett titled The Help.  It follows a group of privileged white women in their 30s and 40s with families and follows their “help”.  Their help consisted of older black women who did everything from cooking and cleaning to raising their children.  I first began to make this connection while reading Audre Lorde’s piece.  In The Help one of the white women, Miss Skeeter, who is not married, becomes intrigued by the lives of the help that her friends have employed and rely on daily.  She is the only one who realizes how oppressed these women are and has an idea to help them: interview them on what it is like working for a white privileged family and write a book containing all the very candid interviews.  The time period that this book is set in is well before when Lorde was writing, but I saw many of the same ideas coming through.  I first noticed the similarities between the two when Lorde says, “…how do you deal with the fact that the women who clean your houses and tend to your children while you attend conferences on feminist theory are, for the most part, poor women and women of Color?”  This is exactly what happened in the book as well.  The women met in weekly meetings for various clubs and organizations while completely disregarding that the help might also like these same freedoms.  Much of the book focuses on the civil rights movement and not on the feminist movement, but the ideas that Lorde presented were similar, in my mind at least.  She mentions that the white feminist movement was not doing a good job of acknowledging the differences between different groups of women and the women in the book were not dealing with them either.  There are, of course, the few women like Miss Skeeter and Peggy McIntosh who realize the unfair privileges that white people enjoy and who try to do something about it.  While both Lorde and McIntosh wrote in the 1980s and we have made progress since then, we still, I believe, need more women like them to speak up.