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Gender Roles In Susan Glaspell's 'A Jury Of Peers'

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“A Tale Of Two Fed Up Housewives” A housewife is often described as a woman whose sole duty is to take care of the house, kids and their husbands. Susan Glaspell’s “A Jury of Peers” and Roald Dahl’s “A Lamb To The Slaughter” both take place in the 1900’s (Suffragette time period) which is a time where woman had no political rights and few rights in general. What people fail to realize is that women do have desires other than being someone’s wife. To have the housewife gender role forced upon you can drive one insane. In these short stories, both housewives are under suspicion for having murdered their husbands. Both housewives had dealt with their ungrateful and awful husbands long enough and they’d reached their breaking point. They’d given their husband everything and they weren’t appreciative. These women didn’t …show more content…

She’d wait on him hand and foot, ready to please in any way she could. Her character shifted as her husband informed her he was leaving her for another. She was in denial and figured he was joking until she realized he wasn’t and reality had set in. She became angry, cold and calculating. As a result, she took the frozen leg of lamb she was thawing for him for dinner, and hiit him over the head killing him. After she killed him she sprang into action playing the distraught wife but not before she created an alibi for herself just in case. She proceeds to mess up the living room to create a robbery scene. The cops show up at her house for question where she offers the policemen lamb which doubles as the murder weapon. Mary Maloney is pleased with herself, she’d gotten away with it. This short story is often compared with Susan Glaspell’s “A Jury of Peers” where elderly woman named Mrs. Wright (Minnie Foster) is a accused of strangling her husband to death and as a result is arrested but the attorney must prove she did the crime to prosecute her. Minnie used to be

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In “Lamb to the Slaughter” by Roald Dahl, the protagonist Mrs. Maloney is dynamic in the story. The author used diction, her actions and thoughts to show the reader that she’s dynamic. Dahl also showed how at first Mrs. Maloney was a kind and caring person then changed drastically into the exact opposite, which is into a murderer. Starting from the beginning, the author described Mrs. Maloney as a peaceful and calm woman. The author says “As she bent over her sewing, she was curiously peaceful” (Dahl 1).

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Upon returning to the Maloney residence she acted as a distraught wife who had just found her dead husband. Mary Maloney then continued to cook dinner after the officers arrived, she told them it would calm her down, when in reality she was cooking the murder weapon. Mary Maloney does not stop there, she then begs the officers at the scene to eat the leg of lamb, telling them it would be doing her a favor. “ ‘Please,” she begged.

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Right when she killed him she put the lambs leg in the oven to cook. She killed him because he wanted to break up with her but the wife was mad and upset about him leaving her for an other woman. She made it look like some one else killed him and called the police. The police asked her question about the husband death but all she said that she found him dead. She ask the detective to turn off the oven and take out the lambs leg.

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Welter states, “The best refuge for such a delicate creature was the warmth and safety of her home. The true woman’s place was unquestionably her own fireside—as daughter, sister, but most of all as wife and mother, Therefore domesticity was among the virtues most prized by women’s magazines” (Welter 5). Since the woman was confined to the house, without any other options for work or hobbies, the home was more of a prison than a place of comfort. Welter states that the “woman, in the cult of True Womanhood…was the hostage in the home” (Welter 1). The narrator in the short story is seen to suffer from this sort of

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The way she addresses her husband, Patrick, is caring and compassionate. As the story progresses she gets more and more uneasy until Patrick tells her very bad news, and the entire mood of the story shifts. Mary becomes removed, cold, in shock. At this point, she “simply walked up behind him and without any pause, she swung the big frozen leg of lamb high in the air and brought it down as hard as she could on the back of his head” ( ). Patrick died within seconds.

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During the 1890’s until today, the roles of women and their rights have severely changed. They have been inferior, submissive, and trapped by their marriage. Women have slowly evolved into individuals that have rights and can represent “feminine individuality”. The fact that they be intended to be house-caring women has changed.

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