SOURCE: “Small Things Reconsidered: ‘A Jury of Her Peers,’” in Susan Glaspell: Essays on Her Theater and Fiction, edited by Linda Ben-Zvi, The University of Michigan Press, 1995, pp. 49–67.

In the excerpt below, first published in 1986, Hedges reconstructs women's social history of the nineteenth-century American West to explain the symbolism of Glaspell's story “A Jury of Her Peers.”

Susan Glaspell's “A Jury of Her Peers” is by now a small feminist classic. Published in 1917, rediscovered in the early 1970s, and increasingly reprinted since then in anthologies and textbooks, it has become for both readers and critics a familiar and frequently revisited landmark on our “map of rereading.” For Lee Edwards and Arlyn Diamond in 1973 it introduced us to the work of one of the important but forgotten women writers who were then being rediscovered, and its characters, “prairie matrons, bound by poverty and limited experience [who] fight heroic battles...