A Jury of Her Peers by Susan Glaspell

The setting is around the 1900’s in a place called Dickson County, IA. A rural area where it seems a lot of farming is done and the women are supposes to stay home and tend to the home and farm life. A theme throughout the story is feminism. The title supports this by how the antagonist, Minnie Wright, will be tried by her peers, co-protagonists Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters. The women hold the power. The men are off gathering evidence and the women stay in the kitchen where the story is unraveled and told from. The plot is to figure out how Mrs. Wright will be judged. The name “Minnie” is short for minimized which is a symbol of how minimized she felt in her life. She lived a secluded life and was thought of as a mere housewife. The bird cage symbolizes Minnie’s life caged up and John Wright (husband) strangling the bird is like Minnie’s breaking point. The bird and Minnie are the same in how the bird sings beautifully like Minnie used to before she was married and was trapped in her marriage like the bird in the cage. The point of view is third person limited omniscient in how the story is told from Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters and how they see the surroundings and how they feel about everything they see. The denouement is that the women decide to not show the evidence against Mrs. Wright.

This story was really good. I like detective shows and this reminded me of them. The way the women know how they all think and have that sense that something was wrong is kind of mind bottling. The men who are the detectives do not get as much evidence from the kitchen like the women do and they think of them as simple minded and not capable of much but house work. They obviously were mistaken. The fact that they know what Minnie might have been going through shows that they might not be so happy either and have gone through tough things too. Mrs. Peters is kind of afraid to give her thoughts but does so later on. She is the one who does not want to give the evidence to the sheriff that will incriminate Minnie. It is sad how John would kill the only thing that made her happy, I would have killed him too.