Women In Susan Glaspell's A Jury Of Her Peers

In Susan Glaspell’s “A Jury of Her Peers” (Roberts, Edgar V., and Henry E. Jacobs. Literature: An Introduction to Reading and Writing [Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2001. Print] 202-216), a county attorney, a sheriff, and their wives investigate at the house of Mrs. Wright for her alleged murder of her husband. The men and women split off to look around the house and towards the end of the story, the two wives, Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters, eventually find evidence in favor of her being the criminal. However, instead of turning the proof in, the women conceal it from their own husbands and keep the secret to themselves. The reader is never given an explicit reason for their actions, but Glaspell uses the women’s emotions, such as their empathy for Mrs.
Throughout the story, they find several motives for why Mrs. Wright would kill her husband and sympathize the pain she goes through. As they look through Mrs. Wright’s closet to find clothes to give to her in jail, the two women observe how rugged and old her clothes appear, showing that Mr. Wright must not have been financially stable enough to provide her with the items that she desires. This extremely upsets Mrs. Hale, for she had known the unmarried Mrs. Wright, who was widely known to be beautiful, lively, and one of fashion. Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters also examine the kitchen of the house and find everything in a mess and every chore half-finished. While the men degrade her for not fulfilling her duties as a wife, the women support her and exclaim that “farmers’ wives have their hands full” (207). The stove in the poor conditioned kitchen is also used as a metaphor to Mrs. Wright’s relationship with her husband when the two women find it to be broken. The story states that Mrs. Hale thinks “of what it would mean, year after year, to have that stove to wrestle with, and Mrs. Peters replies, “A person gets discouraged—and loses heart” (210). This clearly exemplifies the