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Gender Roles In Susan Glaspell's 'A Jury Of Peers'

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“A Tale Of Two Fed Up Housewives” A housewife is often described as a woman whose sole duty is to take care of the house, kids and their husbands. Susan Glaspell’s “A Jury of Peers” and Roald Dahl’s “A Lamb To The Slaughter” both take place in the 1900’s (Suffragette time period) which is a time where woman had no political rights and few rights in general. What people fail to realize is that women do have desires other than being someone’s wife. To have the housewife gender role forced upon you can drive one insane. In these short stories, both housewives are under suspicion for having murdered their husbands. Both housewives had dealt with their ungrateful and awful husbands long enough and they’d reached their breaking point. They’d given their husband everything and they weren’t appreciative. These women didn’t …show more content…

She’d wait on him hand and foot, ready to please in any way she could. Her character shifted as her husband informed her he was leaving her for another. She was in denial and figured he was joking until she realized he wasn’t and reality had set in. She became angry, cold and calculating. As a result, she took the frozen leg of lamb she was thawing for him for dinner, and hiit him over the head killing him. After she killed him she sprang into action playing the distraught wife but not before she created an alibi for herself just in case. She proceeds to mess up the living room to create a robbery scene. The cops show up at her house for question where she offers the policemen lamb which doubles as the murder weapon. Mary Maloney is pleased with herself, she’d gotten away with it. This short story is often compared with Susan Glaspell’s “A Jury of Peers” where elderly woman named Mrs. Wright (Minnie Foster) is a accused of strangling her husband to death and as a result is arrested but the attorney must prove she did the crime to prosecute her. Minnie used to be

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