A Jury of Her Peers

All throughout Susan Glaspell's A Jury of Her Peers there was a discrete difference between the men and the woman shown by their actions and their attitudes. Then men made it obvious that they felt superior and mroe intelligent to the women. They make it sound like the women are only as good as their homes are clean."Dirty towles! Not much of a housekeeper, would you say, ladies?" (Glaspell, 412). All of the men had this condescending tone in their voice; the county attorney had the most. This man was especially facetious in his last line in the short story, "Well Henry, at least we found out that she was not going to quilt it." (Glaspell, 426). These men could not take seriously the fact that Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters had found anything in the kitchen, let alone the exact motive Minnie Wright had for killing her husband.

This is where we saw the biggest difference in the characters. While the men went upstairs and outside to the barn to look for solid evidence and motives as to why Minnie killed her husband, the women were rummaging through the kitchen just trying to understand her. They were more concerned with how she had been treated over the twenty five years and why after all that time she felt the need to kill her husband. Because all women at that time were treated with inferiority, they could understand why Minnie came off the way she did. Then when they found the dead canary that had obviously been strangled by John Wright, they understood why Minnie snapped. Minnie had been isolated from everything. She had been locked up in that house forced to fulfill the duties of an expected housewife. Her husband had killed her passion of singing and had not given her any children; therefore, when he killed her only love, that bird, she went off in a rage. Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters could understand where she had been coming from and continually lied to their husbands about what they had been doing. Mrs. Hale even went to the extent of hiding any evidence of Minnie's true motive. They stuck up for their kind, their female gender. If they did not, who would?