"A Jury of Her Peers" Susan Glaspell

I am in the middle of reading "A Jury of Her Peers" by Elaine Showalter, a criticism of American women's literature. This 600+ page book is waiting for me back in Iowa to finish when I get back from Alaska. The name of the book was taken from Susan Glaspell's short story, which was written in 1917 in Iowa. Glaspell is one of the authors that Showalter discusses in her book. I was disappointed to find that my Norton Anthology of Women’s Literature did not have a larger intersection with the authors in Showalter’s book, but you can find a lot of literature that is no longer (or never) copyrighted on the web. I thought a good place to start was with the story Showalter’s book was named for.

In Glaspell's short story, a man has died and several men and two of their wives go to his farm house, the men to investigate and the women to gather some things to take to the wife of the dead man. The man was strangled and the wife claims she was not awake when the murder took place. At the house, the men, consisting of the farmer who discovered the body, the sheriff and the district attorney, look through the rooms and the barn looking for evidence that someone else had gotten in and killed the man. They are disdainful of the activity of the women they brought along, because they seem to be more concerned with the trivial elements of day-to-day housewifery instead of the big picture. However, it is the women who discover keys to the life of the dead man and his wife and probably the motive for the murder. These women decide for themselves whether to disclose or hide evidence, and thus are serving as a jury for the wife of the dead man - a jury of her peers. It turns out that the men would never have looked in the places that they women did, and thus would never have drawn the same conclusions.

I found it interesting to read this short story, which had quilting references, while my sister and I were making baby quilts. The circumstances of quilting are completely different in this story from 90 years ago and today. We bought all new fabric and are quilting for our own pleasure and could simply buy blankets instead, and the woman in the story was using fabric scraps to make her quilt, which I guess she is making out of necessity. We are doing much of the work by machine, but she did everything by hand. The question the women in the story ask, which is ridiculed by the men as a triviality, is whether she would quilt or knot it, and that question is the same for me and my sister. I don't know if Glaspell meant for this connection, but the man in the story is killed with a knotted rope and the women suspect that his wife planned to knot the quilt. Hmmm.

The full-text of this story can be found in many places on the web.