1916, a time full of poverty and war, and the year Susan Glaspell wrote Trifles. Glaspell lived through the times when men considered the duties and opinions of women trivial, she understood how the women in trifles felt not only on a general level, but also personal, Glaspell spent two years working at the Des Moines Daily News, while she was working there she covered a real life murder trial and incarceration of a farmer’s wife, her inspiration to write Trifles. In society at the time women’s social status was viewed as beneath that of a man’s, but in this murder case, the women had the upper hand the whole time.
