Intuition in A Jury of Her Peers Essay -- A Jury of Her Peers Essays

recognition in A Jury of Her Peers Though manpower and wo men ar right away recognized as generally equal in talent and intelligence, when Susan Glaspell wrote A Jury of Her Peers in 1917, it was not so. In this turn-of-the-century, rural midwestern setting, women were a great deal barely educated and possessed virtually no political or economic power. And, being the weaker sex, there was not much they could do closely it. Relegated to home and hearth, women found themselves at the mercy of the more powerful men in their lives. Ironically, it is just this type of powerless existence, perhaps, that over the ages developed into a power with which women could baffle and frustrate their male counterparts a sixth sand - an inborn trait commonly known as womens intuition. In Glaspells story, teetotal situations billet male and female intuition, illustrating that Minnie Wright is more fairly judged by a jury of her peers. A Jury of Her Peers first uses irony to illus trate the contrast between male and female intuition when the men go to the farmhouse sounding for clues to the murder of John Wright, but it is the women who find them. In the Wright household, the men are searching for something out of the ordinary, an obvious indication that Minnie has been enraged or aggravated into killing her husband. Their intuition does not tell them that their wives, because they are women, can suffice them gain insight into what has occurred between John and his wife. They bring Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters along merely to tend to the practical matters, considering them needlessly preoccupied with trivial things and heretofore too unintelligent to make a contribution to the investigation, as Mr. Hales jeering question reveals... ...or her motivation therefore, in hiding the bird, by their silence, they acquit Minnie Wright. through the ironic situations in A Jury of Her Peers, Glaspell clearly illustrates a sphere in which men and women v ary greatly in their perception of things. She shows men as often superficial in the way they perceive the world, absentminded the depth of intuition that women use as a means of self-preservation to collect themselves and the world more clearly. Without the heightened perspective on life that this knowledge of forgiving nature gives them, women might not stand a chance. Against the power and mastery of men, they often find themselves as defenseless and vulnerable as Minnies curt bird. WORK CITED Glaspell, Susan. A Jury of Her Peers. Lfted Masks and Other Works. Ed. Eric S. Rabkin. Ann Arbor U of Michigan p, 1993.