Believing his career is over, Senator Jay Bulworth takes out an enormous insurance policy and a contract on his own life. His impending death fills him with an outrageous desire to break the rules and tell it like it is.

Mississippi during the 1960s: Skeeter, a southern society girl, returns from college determined to become a writer, but turns her friends' lives, and a small Mississippi town, upside down when she decides to interview the black women who have spent their lives taking care of prominent southern families. Aibileen, Skeeter's best friend's housekeeper, is the first to open up, to the dismay of her friends in the tight-knit black community.