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The idea that a person accused of a crime should be tried by a jury of peers, or of fellow citizens, is encoded in the Sixth Amendment of the United States Constitution (1791) along with other legal rights that citizens enjoy, such as the right to a public trial without undue delay and to legal representation. The peers seated on a jury were, from the nation’s earliest years, intended to represent a cross-section of the community in which a defendant would be judged. However, not until the Civil Rights Act (1957) did the definition of “peers” explicitly include women. And not until the Supreme Court ruling in Taylor v. Louisiana were all states legally compelled to stop systematically excluding women, as a class protected under the Fourteenth Amendment (1868), from jury duty.
At the time that Glaspell wrote Trifles (1916), the play on which “A Jury of Her Peers” (1917) is based, few states allowed women to serve as jurors. Even ten years after the story’s debut, in 1927, only 19 states did so, and only to a limited degree. The reasons that women were deemed legally unfit to serve varied. Broad justifications included “defect of sex,” which alleged that women were simply not fit to serve on juries or to undertake civic obligations such as voting. Women were also excluded because their role was in the home caring for children, because some cases included distressing details, because men and women serving long jury duties together might fraternize, and because women might prove too tender-hearted to render a just verdict. Other classes of citizens were also excluded from jury duty, on the basis of race and ethnicity, during this time, making it unlikely that defendants who were not white males would face a jury of peers.
Yet the right to be tried by a jury of fellow citizens requires that jury selection involve an actual cross-section of a community. Before she wrote Trifles and “A Jury of Her Peers,” Glaspell worked as a reporter on the months-long trial in Indianola, Iowa, of Margaret Hossack, a woman accused of killing her husband in December 1900. Glaspell’s reporting listed the names of the “twelve good men” who served as the jury, and she noted that the evidence against Hossack was “a web of circumstantial evidence.” As the trial neared its end, Glaspell’s reporting took on a less objective and more literary turn. She observed that some people felt sympathetic to Hossack, while many others spoke against her and acted as “thirteenth jurors” who influenced the trial. The jury found Hossack guilty, and she served part of a life sentence before her conviction was overturned on appeal. Later research on the case determined that Hossack had suffered domestic abuse, which could have been a motive for murder and made the case against her stronger. Yet her domestic situation was of no interest to the attorneys or the jury, who were fascinated instead by the manner of the murder, which has never been officially solved.
