In her short story, “A Jury of Her Peers” author Susan Glaspell indites about the investigation of a murder that occurred at a farmhouse in the country. Two women unearth evidence cognate to a crime that the Sheriff and the local prosecutor are investigating, a farmwife's murder of her husband. While sitting in the kitchen of the farmhouse, the two women uncover clues that point to a history of psychological abuse that led Minnie Wright to strangle her husband. The women discover the ostensible motive for Minnie's crime when they found the dead body of Minnie's canary with its neck snapped. The story takes place at a time, 1917 when an all-male jury would have tried Minnie. Consequently, whenever a woman was on trial, a jury of her peers was
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Hale empathizes with Minnie the moment she finds the bird’s desolate body. she says to Mrs. Peters, "If there had been years and years of--nothing, then a bird to sing to you, it would be awful--still--after the bird was still" (Glaspell, 1986, 453). Showing just how much she felt for Minnie. The men in the story would have never understood the hope and life the bird brought into Minnie’s life and the agony losing her last sliver of joy must have cost her. Because they understand how John’s killing the canary must have been the last straw in killing his wife’s love of life, Martha and Mrs. Peters “knot” the criminal investigation. They shift their adhesion from their husbands, and the male-dominated judicial system, to a woman who mirrors their own lives. As Martha wistfully says of her regret in abandoning her neighbor Minnie, “we live close together, and we live far apart. We all go through the same things—it’s all just a different kind of the same thing!” (Glaspell, 1986, 454) If the men were to have been shown the same set of evidence they would have never come to the same conclusion as the women. Because the legal defense of justifiable homicide by an abused wife might not have succeeded in the early twentieth century, the women take matters into their own
Hale empathizes with Minnie the moment she finds the bird’s desolate body. she says to Mrs. Peters, "If there had been years and years of--nothing, then a bird to sing to you, it would be awful--still--after the bird was still" (Glaspell, 1986, 453). Showing just how much she felt for Minnie. The men in the story would have never understood the hope and life the bird brought into Minnie’s life and the agony losing her last sliver of joy must have cost her. Because they understand how John’s killing the canary must have been the last straw in killing his wife’s love of life, Martha and Mrs. Peters “knot” the criminal investigation. They shift their adhesion from their husbands, and the male-dominated judicial system, to a woman who mirrors their own lives. As Martha wistfully says of her regret in abandoning her neighbor Minnie, “we live close together, and we live far apart. We all go through the same things—it’s all just a different kind of the same thing!” (Glaspell, 1986, 454) If the men were to have been shown the same set of evidence they would have never come to the same conclusion as the women. Because the legal defense of justifiable homicide by an abused wife might not have succeeded in the early twentieth century, the women take matters into their own