it her personal mission to ensure that each family in Jackson builds a separate restroom for their black maids to use. In a great (and humorous) act of defiance toward this belief, Skeeter covers Hilly's lawn in toilets as a practical joke, which fairly solidifies the conflict between the two former friends.

Interestingly, Hilly tries to convince the town (and maybe herself) that she is not racist through her fundraising efforts:

“Hilly.” I just need to hear her say it. “Just who is all that pound cake money being raised for, anyway?”

She rolls her eyes. “The Poor Starving Children of Africa?”

I wait for her to catch the irony of this, that she’ll send money to colored people overseas, but not across town.

Unfortunately, Hilly does not see the irony in this situation and furthers her stance by clarifying why they must send actual food and not money to Africa:

You cannot give these tribal people money ... There is no Jitney 14 Grocery in the Ogaden Desert. And how would we even know if they're even feeding their kids with it? They're likely to go to the local voodoo tent and get a satanic tattoo with our money.

Hilly thus is symbolic of the traditionally racist views of Jackson during this era, and Skeeter is symbolic of progressive actions, bringing to light the ways upper-class white women have taken advantage of their black maids and trying to ignite change. The two are positioned for conflict because of their polar opposite views on civil rights.

Kathryn Stockett's novel, The Help, is about African American women working as maids in white households during the 1960s in Mississippi. The story is mainly about maids, Aibileen and Minnie, and Skeeter, a white woman who returns home from college to be a writer.

Skeeter grew up in Mississippi and realizes that the maids in her household are treated differently than the white employees. She decides to make this public knowledge and enlists the help of Aibileen and Minnie to help her tell the truth. Skeeter rustles feathers of her friends and family members when she decides to do this. One person who is bothered by Skeeter's story is her friend Hilly.

Hilly Holbrook is a white woman who does not treat her maids very kindly. She gets one of her maids arrested for stealing after refusing to loan her money for her son. Hilly also wants to start a "Home Help Sanitation Initiative" which would require all black employees to use separate bathrooms when working in white households. Hilly asks Skeeter to publish an ad for this initiative in the local paper. Because Skeeter disagrees with Hilly about the decency of her initiative, Skeeter publishes an ad for a clothing drive instead. When loads of clothing arrive at Hilly's house, Hilly becomes upset and ends her friendship with Skeeter—something that makes Skeeter happy.

The main conflict between these two friends is a major difference in opinion. Hilly believes that black maids should not be treated as humans. Skeeter believes in treating everyone as worthy and will stand up for what she believes is right, even if it means losing a friend.

In Kathryn Stockett's The Help, Skeeter, Elizabeth and Hilly are peers.

Skeeter is a free spirit who has no difficulty thinking for herself. Raised by a black maid who she deeply cared for, and having graduated from college, Skeeter is angry to see the way the other women mistreat their black maids. Skeeter finds that she has very little in common with these women she grew up with. Skeeter is aware that there is a line in society that separates her from "the help," but she is more prone to try to cross it, while Hilly and Elizabeth would never think of such a thing. It is the help, especially Aibileen, who reminds Skeeter of that line and how crossing it could be dangerous for the black maids that Skeeter wants to write about.

Skeeter has no illusions that she is something of an odd duck in comparison to the other women in Jackson. Struggling to write about Hilly's "Home Health Sanitation Initiative," Skeeter discovers something about herself—perhaps that it is all right to be different, especially in that if she were the same, it would be a terrible thing. If she is insane by not following the societal norms in Jackson, we can assume she would rather be crazy than not.

When I started typing out her bathroom initiative for the newsletter, typing words like disease and protect yourself and you’re welcome!, it was like something cracked open inside of me, not unlike a watermelon, cool and soothing and sweet. I always thought insanity would be a dark, bitter feeling, but it is drenching and delicious if you really roll around in it.

Elizabeth Leefolt is Aibileen's employer. She does not have an overly strong personality, and is generally not apt to have an original thought, deferring instead to Hilly. In fact, many of the things she wants to do or think are based on Hilly's opinion rather than Elizabeth's. Elizabeth and her husband do not have the money that Hilly and her other friends have. However, Elizabeth is [barely] able to afford Aibileen to raise her baby, a job Elizabeth neither enjoys nor seems to want to do. On her first day working at the Leefolt's Aibileen recalls:

Miss Leefolt, she look terrified a her own child. "What am I doing wrong? Why can't I stop it?"

It? That was my first hint: something is wrong with this situation.

She spends little time with her daughter and is abusive. It is Aibileen who, loving the little one, coddles Mae Mobley, trying to instill in the toddler that she has value even if her mother refuses to tell her so.

Skeeter is far different from Elizabeth and Hilly, while Hilly and Elizabeth have much more in common. As noted, Elizabeth listens closely to what Hilly has to say. Elizabeth has a personality that can be dominated by someone stronger—and Hilly Holbrooke is that person. Hilly despises Skeeter. Overall, she is a hateful and angry racist and bigot who fights to segregate whites from blacks in every possible way. At one point she encourages all the women she knows to install separate bathrooms in their homes for the help:

They carry different diseases than we do. That's why I've drafted the Home Health Sanitation Initiative.

President of the Junior League in Jackson, Hilly wields a great deal of power among women of her own age and social status. Hilly is not only nasty to the help, but she also goes as far as to falsely accuse Aibileen of stealing from her.

When Hilly suspects Aibileen's involvement in the published book, she threatens Aibileen:

Maybe I can't send you to jail for what you wrote, but I can send you for being a thief.

Hilly lies and says Aibileen stole some of her silverware. Then she fires Aibileen and Elizabeth does not stop her; but Elizabeth apologizes to Aibileen, and tells Hilly that if charges are to be filed, Hilly will have to do it herself. 

All three women are the same age and from the same town. However, Skeeter is far different than Elizabeth and Hilly.

Hilly Holbrooke and Skeeter (Eugenia) Phelan are characters in Kathryn Stockett's novel The Help. The main thing they have in common is their background—they both belong to wealthy, well-established Southern families. They are both young women living in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1962; they have the same social status and they (initially) belong to the same circle of friends.

However, the similarity ends there. When the novel opens, Hilly is married and has children, while Skeeter has just graduated from college. Skeeter is bothered by the relationship between the white women and their black maids ("the help") and decides to write a book exploring this relationship. This project has personal significance to Skeeter because she misses her family's maid, Constantine, who raised her when she was a child. Skeeter is very aware of the whites' and blacks' common humanity. ("I did not know there were so many laws separating us," she says about the Jim Crow laws.) Hilly, on the other hand, is the one trying to increase this separation. Not only is she racist, she also hates other white people (like Celia Foote) who do not have the same background as her.

At the end of the novel, after Skeeter's book exposes Hilly's bigotry, Skeeter and Hilly are bitter enemies.