Rule the World by Maggie Bowcock

When William Wallace penned the line, The Hand that Rocks the Cradle Rules the World, in the 1865 poem called, What Rules the World, he was praising motherhood as the preeminent force for change in the world. Fast forward to Jackson Mississippi, 1960, the setting for the film ‘The Help’ and the viewer sees these prophetic words played out through a series of uncanny events that surround a group of ‘Nannies’ or ‘Maids’ and their interactions with their employers, the privileged families and their children for whom they acted as substitute mothers.

Politically, there was a perfect storm brewing. It was the era of Martin Luther King the great black activist who so eloquently voiced the desire for freedom and equity for the southern Black communities and of President John F Kennedy who also pushed an equal rights agenda for African Americans. However, in reality, as the movie portrays, the black employees of Mississippi had no political status or protection and relied on the goodwill of their employers for their conditions. While the struggle for change is the dominant theme of the movie an intertwined subtheme is worth noting.

The community that allowed the ‘other ‘race with their ‘different germs’ (needing their own black toilets so they wouldn’t be passed on!) to love and nurture their babies while they played with their friends, reminds the observer of the legend of  the Roman Emperor, Nero, who allegedly played the Lyre while Rome burned.  In Jackson, Mississippi, then, it is inevitable that the love these ‘maids’ lavished on their employers’ white babies would eventually win the love, respect and loyalty of the grown child. Thus, when they gave up their babies, the seeds of destruction for their privileged white, wealthy, lifestyle, were planted, and the opportunity is given for ‘Skeeter,’ (the grown white child raised by her beloved black maid) to rise up with the courage to risk alienation from her family and peers and join forces with the maids. Skeeter, a writer, uses the privilege of her education to give voice to the living and working conditions of this black community and tell their story thus forcing social change by exposing a level of racism that was not accepted in other parts of the country. The maid, Aibileen, points to this subtheme within the movie as she constantly tells her little ‘white’  child, remember, ‘you are important, you are pretty and you can do anything.’