"A Jury of Her Peers"

“A Jury of Her Peers” by Susan Glaspell is a story about murder and the search for evidence there after. One day Mr. Hale came to see Mr. Wright to talk to him about getting a telephone wire installed in their neighborhood. However, when Mr. Hale arrived at Mr. Wright’s house, he found Mrs. Wright looking confused rocking back and forth in her rocking chair non stop and when he asked her where John was she calmly explained that he was upstairs dead. The sheriff, an attorney, Mr. Hale came to the Wright house to go over the evidence and find a motive ,while the women gathered belongings for Mrs. Wright who was in jail. The men made several derogatory comments toward the women and even directly stated that the women wouldn’t know a clue if they found one. As the women gathered Mrs. Wright belongings they talked about how beautiful and enthusiastic Mrs. Wright was before she married John. They all seemed to agree that marrying John was much more detrimental to Mrs. Wright’s life than they had all realized prior to the murder. They said John had choked the life right out of Mrs. Wright. As the women talked they came across a quilt that looked like Mrs. Wright had hurriedly stitched. Then they found a bird cage with a broken hinge. Last, they found a canary which apparently was the only bright spot left in Mrs. Wright’s life that had been choked to death. This was clearly the motive for which the men had been searching. John had choked the life out of Mrs. Wright and her pet canary and in turn Mrs. Wright returned the favor to a sleeping John Wright. Though the women did not advocate murder they sympathized with Mrs. Wright enough to keep this evidence hidden from the men. The men were far too cocky and arrogant to even ask if the women had found any evidence and the story inferred that without a motive, Mrs. Wright would probably not be convicted. Thus, Mrs. Wright was judged by a jury of her own peers because the very women that the sheriff seemed to castigate, not only solved the crime before he could, but also decided Mrs. Wright’s fate with their sealed lips and chicanery.