What Is a Woman in A Jury of Her Peers?

What is a Woman in A Jury of Her Peers?

John McHale, University of Florida

For much of human history, the question, “what is a woman?” would have seemed like a silly one. A woman, one might have said, is a biological female who has ovaries, produces eggs, births young, and raises families. Indeed, woman has been largely considered a biological category far longer than she hasn’t. And for the purpose of the argument being presented, the definition of woman will not be one grounded in biology, but rather, one which takes into account the innumerable social forces which make up woman. This separation of the concept “woman” from her natural biological characteristics was first made by the French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir when she posited, “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” (de Beauvoir 281). de Beauvoir and the feminists that followed her often made the same distinction between what we today recognize as gender and sex, whereas earlier authors and feminists like Emma Goldman and Susan Glaspell would not have drawn this line, as Glaspell refers to woman being “’loyal to [her] sex,’” the operative word being “sex” (Glaspell 264).

However, this is not to say the she only sees woman as a biological category, and this linguistic discrepancy is likely the result of Glaspell not having the vocabulary to put into words the distinction de Beauvoir makes almost 30 years later. Despite Glaspell’s A Jury of Her Peers (AJOHP) preceding de Beauvoir’s preeminent treatise entitled The Second Sex by several decades, the struggle of woman, though unique to each individual, is a narrative that has existed since the beginning of man. To this end, de Beauvoir is simply rendering into philosophical language what women like Glaspell had already been experiencing. The narrative provided by Glaspell in AJOHP, for all its differences from later works like The Second Sex, still contains remarkable similarities to some of de Beauvoir’s ideas about womanhood. And as was previously mentioned, de Beauvoir seems to think that a woman is not born so but becomes so. She argues that a woman’s femininity is constructed through being othered by man, positing her as secondary respective to him (hence the title of her treatise). Taking into consideration the long history of woman’s otherness, one is rather unsurprised to find notable similarities between how woman is represented in both AJOHP and The Second Sex, so it should be clarified that the argument contained within this paper is in no way an attempt to compare Glaspell and de Beauvoir as contemporaries, but rather, to employ works like The Second Sex in order to provide a new and unique reading of Glaspell’s A Jury of Her Peers.

Marriage

The marital institution joins woman to man, but it is not the beginning of her othering; from the moment she is born, man others her, propelling her towards the culmination, the telos of woman’s socialization, marriage. For de Beauvoir, marriage represented a social institution founded by men for the purpose of conquering woman and making her dependent upon man, the subject. The consequences of marriage for woman are far-reaching and best described by the following passage from The Second Sex:

He is the economic head of the joint enterprise, and hence he represents it in the view of society. She takes his name; she belongs to his religion, his class, his circle; she joins his family, she becomes his ‘half.’ (…) she breaks more or less decisively from her past… (de Beauvoir 451)

Compare this with the role of marriage in Glaspell’s AJOHP, and one will find most, if not all, of the above characteristics represented among her three female characters.

First, de Beauvoir establishes the nature of this dependency in economic terms; put simply, man is the breadwinner, while woman is reliant on him for her needs and wants. Glaspell pens woman in a similar light when Mr. Hale says, “I went to the house and talked about it before his wife and said all the women-folks liked the telephones (…)” (Glaspell 260). Mr. Hale is evidently trying to sell the Wrights a telephone, and upon realizing Mr. Wright is a tough customer, decides to persuade his wife instead. Mr. Hale imagines that Minnie Foster will do all the convincing for him by asking her husband for permission to buy the telephone.

First, Glaspell is showing the predatory nature of man and how he views the woman as the more easily convinced of the two. Second, the wife is expected to beg and plead with her husband like a child asking for allowance money in order to buy the telephone. The latter of these two observations lies in the economic sphere, portraying man’s childlike perception of woman. And while it is true that the other women of the story are able to see a different side of Minnie Foster, this quote depicts man’s view of woman as a means to an end. In this way, both the subjectivity of man and woman’s objectivity are reaffirmed. Woman, as she exists for the purposes of Mr. Hale, is nothing more than an article, a thing to be used as means for profit.

Marriage can also be described by the unique relation that wife has to her husband in texts such as Glaspell’s AJOHP. To elaborate, the primary text seems to define woman in relation to her husband. For example, Mrs. Peters is referred to as the “sheriff’s wife” almost as often as she is referred to by her formal name. In one memorable occasion, the county attorney, referring to Mrs. Peters, exclaims that a “sheriff’s wife is married to the law,” thereby defining her existence relative to her husband’s profession (Glaspell 280). However, and as is the case with Mrs. Hale, woman can be defined as the object of her man merely by the taking of his last name. Linguistically, we say that a woman ‘takes’ her husband’s family name, but really, this is yet another way of thrusting man’s identity upon woman; his name isn’t something taken, but rather, a gift unwillingly received. And in the case of Mrs. Hale, she is only referred to by her husband’s name, because he lacks any notable occupation amongst the townspeople. Conversely, Mrs. Peters is referred to as the “sheriff’s wife,” because her husband is known by all as the town sheriff. It seems, then, that ‘woman’ to Glaspell is inescapably bound to and defined by man, where the pervasiveness of this phenomenon is largely due to the institution of marriage and its perpetuation by means of economic coercion- a societal agreement to keep woman dependent on man for a roof over her head.

Furthermore, Glaspell recognizes the changing of woman- a break from her past- as another hallmark of marriage by virtue of depicting Minnie as fundamentally changed from her time as a girl. Where the construction of woman’s femininity is a gradual process, marriage is volatile, sudden event whereby ownership of woman is transferred from father to husband. And while Glaspell does not allow us the direct opportunity to observe the wedding, Mrs. Hale describes this supposed ‘break’ when she describes how “[Mrs. Wright] used to wear pretty clothes and be lively ¾ when she was Minnie Foster, one of the town girls, singing in the choir” (Glaspell 268). Here, Glaspell draws a distinction between the Mrs. Wright of the present and the Minnie Foster of the past; they are two different individuals inhabiting the same flesh.

Construction of Femininity

And so, where marriage effectively fixes woman to man, it also removes from her previous life and thrusts her into a new one. However, Glaspell recognizes, though not plainly, that the conditioning and grooming of woman begins in childhood and continues long after marriage, which is to say that she provides examples of man positing woman’s inferiority outside the domestic sphere of marriage. Her intellect is ridiculed, her purpose trivialized, and her property dominated by man until she is reduced to an object.

Intellect and reason are the chief instruments by which one imposes their will upon an environment. However, Mr. Hale, leaving the women to walk upstairs, says, “But would the women know a clue it they did come upon it?” where he establishes the assumption of woman possessing inferior intellect with respect to men (Glaspell 266). He calls into question woman’s capacity to reason while simultaneously asserting that man is better equipped to exercise his intellect, reaffirming his subjecthood. The assumption of woman’s baser intelligence also serves to limit her possibilities in life, confining her to an existence of thinking she isn’t smart enough to question man—that she is best suited for a life both in service to and dependent on him. Here, Glaspell shows that man’s devaluing of woman and her intellectual capacity have broader consequences than those provided directly within the text.

We need not look further than Mrs. Peters as an example of these consequences. Her deference to men and “shrinking manner” are the product of being othered, which Glaspell makes clear through the use of a flashback to Mrs. Peters’ childhood. She describes having once owned a kitten only to witness “a boy [take] a hatchet” to its neck. It, along with the abusive marriage of Minnie Foster, addresses violence towards woman as another aspect by which man others woman. By this token, Mrs. Peters’ cat acts as an extension of herself, and the killing of her cat represents a display of authority by man- his ability to exercise power over woman using the cat as a proxy. Of course, this alone would not singlehandedly construct her femininity, and it is also clear that she was not born timid and deferential to man. So, the murder of the cat also represents killing a certain part of Mrs. Peters’ subjecthood; it killed the part of her that longed to reach out and “hurt him” for what he had done to her (Glaspell 277). Within the text, yes, it is but a single event that we and Glaspell’s characters alike can point to of woman as the other, but we (the reader) are meant to take this as representative of a larger whole.

And though it may be easy to point to this precise moment as the total loss of Mrs. Peters’ subjecthood, we know that she wasn’t always so subdued, because she comments that she needed to be held back or else “[she] would have (…) hurt him” (Glaspell 277). Looking at her character now and assuming many more unmentioned formative experiences occurred, her meekness and timidity are the result of a lifetime of being othered by man. She no longer possesses the desire to strike out against the man’s world she lives in; to her, “the law is [simply] the law” (Glaspell 270). Both her timid nature and ready acceptance of the ‘law’ are reflected by her contentedness in being the other. She represents the quintessentially submissive woman within Glaspell’s AJOHP.

However, it is still important to consider stereotypical misogyny as it appears within the text. Conventionally feminine concepts are often related to housework and childrearing, and this is no exception when it comes to AJOHP. The woman of Glaspell’s short story can be roughly characterized by being bound to the home. Even the more outspoken characters like Mrs. Hale are made uncomfortable by thought of “never [having] had any children around” (277). She, like Mrs. Peters, grounds her identity as woman in her capacity to raise young and take care of the family unit. Though for all of the times she has expressed herself to the men, it seems that she is still inextricably bound to her femininity. Mrs. Peters constructs her femininity in a similar way to Mrs. Hale, but her identity orbits around her husband as well as the rest of the family. The difference is best described by the tones each woman has when in the presence of men. Mrs. Hale, on one hand, is able to respond confidently and maintain her own opinions, while Mrs. Peters struggles to find her voice. However, her often soft voice takes a backseat when she recalls the disturbing memory of losing her first baby while “[she] homesteaded in Dakota” (278). Not only is she haunted by the death of her first child, but she seems equally, if not more, distressed by being without her husband. Her identity as a woman is built on childrearing and by wifehood. It gives her life meaning, and without either of these two things, she loses her purpose, her value, and her utility as a woman, so for Glaspell, Mrs. Peters is the quintessential woman- submissive and dependent on her husband.

Glaspell also offers commentary on the stereotypical roles of the American woman that we are all too familiar with. She uses the kitchen to serve this purpose through the dialogue of both the husbands and their wives; man does not see the complexity contained within the kitchen. To him, it is a foreign land, unremarkable by any standard and containing “’nothing but kitchen things’” (Glaspell 263). Linguistically, the vagueness present from man’s point of view within the text suggests a certain indifference towards and unfamiliarity with the world of the woman.

He sees the kitchen and perceives a room, where woman sees herself; she sees all the complexities contained within her projected onto a space in reality, but man is incapable of seeing these distinctions, because he diminishes woman to one who toils and “[worries] over trifles” (Glaspell 264). Consequently, the husbands and county attorney fail to recognize the inconsistencies in Minnie’s character, because they preemptively dismiss the importance of the space that she frequented and inhabited; they can’t be bothered to ‘think like a woman,’ because it would undermine their masculinity, so instead, they reaffirm their subjecthood by further trivializing the daily duties of woman as she is represented within AJOHP.

Liberation

Glaspell recognizes that woman will invariably be othered by man, but she also affords her the possibility of liberation from the shackles of marriage and objecthood. The promise of woman’s liberation takes on two distinct forms within the text and differs from de Beauvoir’s idea of freedom. For de Beauvoir, an existentialist, woman was also inevitably bound to be othered by man, but where Glaspell places importance on defiance and the abolition of marriage, de Beauvoir returns to the importance of economic autonomy. She believed that woman could regain her independence from man by first acquiring the fiscal means of achieving this end. However, this account of woman’s liberation falls short in its inability to recognize the various barriers to entry that woman must face in order to enter the job market.

Glaspell’s account on the other hand, can be characterized by its emphasis on woman’s defiance of man best exemplified in Mrs. Hale and Peters’ deliberate omission of that “hidden thing [which] would make certain the conviction of [Minnie]” (Glaspell 281). The two wives make a tacit agreement to hide the canary from the husbands and county attorney to confound the investigation. Through discovering the injustices that Minnie suffered in her marriage at the hands of her husband, the other two women come to better understand the mistreatment they themselves are victims of.

The meaning in hiding the canary is twofold: it thwarts the men’s investigation and covers for their jailed acquaintance, thereby recognizing the merit in Minnie’s mariticide. It is unsurprising then, that the objective of the inquest is to convict a woman who found liberation in killing her husband. The investigation represents an attempt by man to put woman back in her place and restore the existing order of things. Additionally, the very act of putting together an investigation shows the power man has in the present institution; he is capable of using the judicial system to achieve his ends, because the systems and institutions of power are comprised of and in place to benefit man at the expense or for the purpose of controlling woman.

Concealing the canary is not a brazen attempt to defy man in the way the Minnie Foster does. But by depriving or withholding something, however trivial it may be, from man (like the canary), woman is able to reclaim and wield some sort of power over the other sex. And though the methods may vary, Glaspell is not unique in recognizing this phenomenon which has persisted over time and transcended cultures. She must use whatever she already possesses or grasp onto anything she can as a means of reclaiming some semblance of her subjecthood. So, Glaspell seems to suggest that it is precisely through these small acts of defiance that woman can regain some sense of agency and that they lead to a sort of awakening that both the wives go through by exploring the life of Minnie Foster.

However, contemporaries of Glaspell like Emma Goldman rejected “the old matrimonial relation [which] restricted woman to the function of man’s servant and bearer of his children” in favor of demanding woman’s “right to love and be loved” (Goldman 172, 173). She recognized, as Glaspell certainly did, that marriage and love were far from synonymous. Woman sought love, but upon venturing out into the world, was met with the proposition of marriage instead “with all its deficiencies [and] narrowness” (Goldman 172). Goldman (and later de Beauvoir) remained unmarried as way of reclaiming her femininity from “external tyrannies,” and a similar case seems to be made by Glaspell in the murder of Mr. Wright (Goldman 172).

Yes, the murder which takes place in AJOHP is a call for woman’s liberation, but it is to be taken metaphorically. The marriage between Minnie and Mr. Wright represents that “old matrimonial relation” mentioned above; it is archetypal and representative of the typical master/servant dynamic found in the domestic sphere, where the killing of Mr. Wright is a call for the “need of unhampered growth of old traditions and habits” (Goldman 173). So, while Glaspell is not literally calling for heads, she is, however, advocating for a certain type of emancipation by rejecting the idea of marriage for marriage’s sake.

She then demonstrates that marriage is a patriarchal institution in her use of three male characters (two of which are husbands) as the primary investigators of the crime scene. Certainly, it is no coincidence then that two wives, content in their respective marriages, are brought along to witness man’s persecution of woman when she dares to defy her ‘master.’ However, and in a twist of fate, the wives, instead of being further discouraged by man, are able to regain some small part of their subjecthood through their small act of defiance. In this way, Glaspell seems to be suggesting that one act of defiance can begin a chain reaction, infecting each woman with the realization that she deserves more than what man tells her she does.

Conclusion

Yet, woman’s emancipation from institutions like marriage or her defiance of man are only the first steps in achieving her liberation. On this subject, Emma Goldman argues that “peace and harmony between the sexes and individuals does not necessarily depend on a superficial equalization of human beings; nor does it call for the elimination of individual traits or peculiarities” (Goldman 169). Essentially, she is drawing a distinction between equality and sameness of the sexes; neither of which are capable of fully realizing woman’s emancipation. Instead, she suggests that the “motto (…) should be understand one another” (Goldman 169). Similarly, Glaspell seems to suggest that this is fundamentally lacking even in the presence of woman’s defiance of man. She stresses that, for men, “it’s all perfectly clear, except the reason for doing it” (Glaspell 279). Where woman cries out “and [insists] upon her own unrestricted freedom,” man only sees an individual act and its consequences, paying no mind to the larger struggle of woman (Goldman 173). Glaspell represents this conundrum using the jury: it will continue to fail so long as it is composed of men with no other purpose than establishing woman’s culpability as opposed to hearing her grievances.

Ultimately, Glaspell’s woman is one who’s existence is not defined in reference to “herself but as relative to [man]” (de Beauvoir xxxix). And for de Beauvoir’s woman to be constructed in her femininity, she must first be othered by man, so that even in creating her feminine identity, she exists as a result of man’s masculinity and subjecthood. Similarly, Glaspell’s woman is shaped and molded by the coercive, male-dominated institutions like marriage and the legal system which further cement woman in her femininity. And marriage, for Glaspell, represents the telos of woman’s othering that chains her to man, thereby condemning her to a life of servitude.

However, she also recognizes that each woman, though similar in her otherness, is the utterly unique sum of her experiences. The contrast between women like Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters illustrates that the vast differences in character are still accounted for by being made secondary to and reliant upon man. Conversely, Minnie exemplifies a woman who, unable to accept her femininity, boldly defies the patriarchal institutions that seek to eradicate her autonomy through mariticide. Therefore, one can conclude that Glaspell’s woman, though unique in some respects, is still merely a continuation in the tradition of woman’s oppression at the hand of man. She has been and continues to be the product of man’s subject; indeed, she is a product in man’s eyes- an object. Her existence is incidental which is not to say that woman is incapable of existing without man, but rather, to suggest that the paradigmatic woman we are familiar with would not.

Works Cited

Beauvoir, Simone de, and H. M. Parshley. The Second Sex. New York, NY : Alfred A. Knopf, 1993., 1993.

Glaspell, Susan, et al. A Jury of Her Peers. Generic NL Freebook Publisher, 1996.

Goldman, Emma. “‘The Tragedy of Woman's Emancipation.’” The Essential Feminist Reader, by Estelle B. Freedman, Modern Library, 2007, pp. 168–174.

Download the paper here

John McHale is a fourth-year English major at the University of Florida. He helps coach the nationally ranked Santa Fe Ethics Team and is currently preparing for law school. Today, John will be presenting a paper on Susan Glaspell’s A Jury of Her Peers.