Susan Glaspell "A Jury of Her Peers" 1917

Susan Glaspell's "A Jury of Her Peers" is a story written in 1917 about a once lively and beautiful young woman turned killer.  In 1917 the ratio of lifelong marriages to marriages ending in divorce was 1 out of 1000.  I believe this figure in no way shows the ratio of happy marriages to miserable ones.  The social stigma of divorce and the legal consequenses of sex outside marriage (which was a jailable offense) was terrifying to young naive women of the time.  This brings us to Minnie Wright  a young wife married to a cold man named John.  John and Minnie lived in a isolated area, in a sad home, with little to no visitors and no telephone.  Telephones were beginning to become common to own at the time of Glaspell's story, but her character John saw no need to get one because as he claimed "people talk to much anyway."  Minnie was lucky enough to buy a canarie with a nice black cage.  This bird was more than a pet it was a source of happiness in her cold bleak exsistance.  In a fit of rage directed at Minnie her husband John broke the bird's cage and grabbed the bird and wrung it's neck.  His exact motives to kill the bird are not directly spelled out but through the reading it was shown that Minnie was possibly not living up to the standards of a wife in her day.  Susan Glaspell goes to great length in this piece to display the common and devastating life a woman was forced to endure under a dominating male figure.  Women were to be seen and not heard, expected to cook and clean.  One cold morning a knock came on Minnie's door it was her neighbor Mr. Hale and his son Harry.  Through questioning Minnie revealed her husband was dead upstairs in their bedroom.  He was strangled to death by a "piece of rope."  A fitting revenge for a beloved canarie's neck being wrung.  The next day as Minnie sat in a jail cell Mr. Hale accompanied by his wife the sheriff, the town prosecuter and the prosecuters wife converged on Minnie's house to collect evidence.  A gun was found but was not used in the murder, an interesting note about how personal this killing really was.  Minnie's mental state was brought forth through the two women's discovery of faulty wifely duties of homemaking and sewing.  The women also discovered the dead bird tucked secrectly into a sewing box.  The two women formed a bond against the men and did not reveal to them any of their findings.  The men constantly joked about the worth of women.  Susan Glaspell developed an interesting sisterhood between Mrs. Hale and the Sheriff's wife.  A secret bond also grew that included the two and Minnie.  Susan wanted readers to value the intelligence and the bond, and the growing sense of wanted freedom of women in the early 1900's.  Susan Glaspell, a self-made women of uncommon education, stuck to writing pieces of literature focused around a woman's desire to find well-to-do husbands in the early days of her career.  Later on Susan made a bold move of the time and had an affair with a married man, whom she later married.  After the affair her writings took on a much different tone.  She flirted with darker stories like "A Jury of Her Peers." She was a trend setter and a figure in a growing women's rights movement that was sweeping the nation at the time, designed upon equality with male counterparts.  This story even though dark symbolized the internal struggle of defeated women of her day.  Glaspell struck back with this piece and laid a threat to the accepted roles of women.  Give us our equality and right to chose a life of our own or we will bring hell.