The film isn’t perfect, to be sure, but it offers a strategic opening to organizers fighting for domestic workers’ rights. And they’ve been smart enough to exploit it.
“My mother has yet to see the movie… I think it’s just because – I think it’s painful. You have a whole generation of women who don’t want to be reminded of the past,” Davis said.
When Viola Davis won a SAG Award for Outstanding Female Actress in a leading role Sunday night her acceptance speech included a special note for the students at Segue Institute of Learning in Central Falls, Rhode Island.
“The Help” took three of the top honors at the Screen Actors Guild Awards Sunday night, turning it into the movie everyone else has to beat as the Oscar awards approach next month.
During Newsweek’s Oscar roundtable, Viola Davis tried to speak about the difficulties of being a black actress in Hollywood–but a well-intentioned reply from Theron was just another example of the problem.
Just before 6am this morning more than 500 domestic workers and children were in buses from around the state of California to march for domestic workers rights at the State Capitol in Sacramento when they learned about the Oscar nominations for ‘The Help.’
According to the historians about the only thing that’s true in the film is that working black women in the South often labored as domestic servants in white homes.
Fifty years after the Jim Crow era in which this much-discussed film is set, the largely immigrant women taking care of rich people’s families remain ignored by most labor protections.
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