After a lifetime spent scrubbing and mending for others, Ana Mae Futrell has passed away. Her relatives reluctantly return to their North Carolina hometown to bury the older sister they never really bothered to know. They didn't know she'd won a big lottery or that she had a son. Who will inherit Ana Mae's millions? Only someone who can interpret the clues she left behind in a quilt.

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.

"Limited Choices tells about the life of Mable Jones, an African American domestic worker from Charlottesville employed in New York City in the 1940s and 1950s. The authors, whose family employed Jones, use an oral interview and their own childhood memories as a starting point in piecing together Jones's life in an effort to investigate the impact of structural racism, and a discriminatory system their family helped uphold. The book treats three different...