In Susan Glaspell’s short story, A Jury of her Peers, Mrs. Peters is torn between siding with her husband, the sheriff, or Mrs. Hale, a fellow woman in town. Although Mr. Peters is pressuring her to keep a look out for something that will help convict Minnie Foster for the murder of her husband, Mrs. Hale is also putting pressure on her to stick up for her own kind, accentuating the commonalities the women share. Mrs. Hale is not the most polite of women, rifling through Minnie’s things as the men search the house for clues, yet the men are far ruder in their comb of the place, constantly generalizing women and putting them down as a whole. Ultimately, Mrs. Peters instinctively unites with Mrs. Hale upon discovering the throttled canary in order to avoid condemning a woman whose shoes she has walked in.
As the wife of the sheriff, Mrs. Peters is constantly
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Peters ultimately chooses to do what her conscience tells her about the word of the law. So far, the legal system outwardly appears to have failed Minnie Wright in her life. She has wound up in a callus, controlling, uncommunicative, and very likely loveless marriage. She was once a happy woman, but her world was forced down in size by her husband. This radical change caused her to become a drastically different person. Minnie Foster is not the same person as Minnie Wright, the latter being merely the broken woman formed molded from despair and loneliness. Even throughout the course of the story, the women are referred to by their married names, thereby using the family names of their husbands to identify them. Like Minnie Wright, there is no longer a Martha, but a Mrs. Hale; once married, women give up these identities. As a wife of a man similar to Mr. Wright, Mrs. Peters is familiar with the lonely life that can often befall a housewife. She opens up slightly when Mrs. Hale touches upon the