Three ordinary women are about to take one extraordinary step. Twenty-two-year-old Skeeter has just returned home after graduating from Ole Miss. She may have a degree but it is 1962 Mississippi and her mother will not be happy till Skeeter has a ring on her finger. Skeeter would normally find solace with her beloved maid Constantine the woman who raised her but Constantine has disappeared and no one will tell Skeeter where she has gone. Aibileen is a black maid a wise regal woman raising her 17th white child. Something has shifted inside her after the loss of her own son who died while his bosses looked the other way. She is devoted to the little girl she looks after though she knows both their hearts may be broken. Minny Aibileens best friend is short fat and perhaps the sassiest woman in Mississippi. She can cook like nobodys business but she cant mind her tongue so shes lost yet another job. Minny finally finds a position working for someone too new to town to know her reputation. But her new boss has secrets of her own. Seemingly as different from one another as can be these women will nonetheless come together for a clandestine project that will put them all at risk. And why? Because they are suffocating within the lines that define their town and their times. And sometimes lines are made to be crossed. In pitch-perfect voices Kathryn Stockett creates three extraordinary women whose determination to start a movement of their own forever changes a town and the way women - mothers daughters caregivers friends - view one another