Similarities between The Help and Hidden Figures

Life is filled with ups and downs especially for those who were born in the 1960s. Back in the 1960s in the United States, one’s skin color and gender could have a huge impact on one’s life. People who have darker complexion faced lots of injustice in almost every aspect of their life. What’s more, for females, things can be even more complicated. In the two movies, The Help and Hidden Figures, both of which depict the struggles that happened to the colored females. They focus on different groups of character: The Help focuses on maids, while the other one, Hidden Figures focus on the engineers in NASA. Despite the differences, these two movies still share a lot in common. Thus, the following paragraphs will focus on some similarities in these two films.

The first similarity is that they both address the issue of racism. What’s more, both directors focus on the use of the bathroom scene to reveal the issue of racism. In The Help, the maids aren’t allowed to use the bathroom in their owner’s houses. For the ridiculous misconception that colored people carry bad germs that will contaminate the others. Similarly, in Hidden Figures, the high- intelligence engineers are also being affected by the racism phenomenon. They can’t use the same bathroom as their white colleagues. These colored ladies need to use another bathroom labeled with “Colored Ladies’ Room”. Though it’s obvious that people all pee in the same color, the concept of racism seems to blindfold the mind of the people at that time.

Secondly, the contrast of genders takes a crucial part in both films. In The Help, the maid whose name is Minny lost her job. However, unlike her husband who is also unemployed, Minny tries hard to find a new job because she is the one who needs to put food on the table. Therefore, the contrast between diligent women and lazy men can be easily seen from the movie. In the Hidden Figures, the contrast of genders was developed even further. For example, Katherine, the leading actress, is the only one female engineer in the entire office. She needs to work 10 times harder than her male superior in order to put her name on the documents. This shows that the glass ceiling effect caused by gender really exist.

Lastly, both films show the importance of courage. The maids in The Help are really brave to share their stories with a book writer, Eugenia Skeeter, and help her collect stories to form a book. And as the result of their bravery, people can have a much clearer insight on the life and the hardship of being the working class or maids during the time period. Likewise, the female engineers in Hidden Figures have no choice but to show a huge courage to be the pioneer in the scientific world, which are mostly dominant by men. Thus, according to these two films, courage appears to be the necessary element when you want to make some changes in life.

To sum up, from these two movies, we can see that we can neither choose our skin color nor our gender, but we can choose to be brave and make some changes. Also, when facing obstacles in life, all we should do is to stay positive and make good use of what we have rather than trying to dodge the problems and think how unlucky we are.

The Help

Retrieved from: https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%9B%B8%E5%8A%A9

Hidden Figure:

Retrieved from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Figures