The main conflict in “A Jury of Her Peers” is one of perception as three men and two women try to discover Minnie Wright's motive for murdering her husband.

No one has any real doubt that Minnie is the culprit. Her behavior is so strange, and the circumstances all point directly to her. Yet the men (Sheriff Peters, Lewis Hale, and county attorney George Henderson) cannot figure out why Minnie would have resorted to murder. They cannot see any reason for it, no matter how hard they look.

Of course, the two women, Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale, approach the issue from a much different perspective. While the men examine the crime scene upstairs, the women focus their attention on Minnie's domestic domain. Perhaps smarting a bit from Mr. Hale's remark about women not knowing a clue if they found one, they look around carefully with an eye to detail.

Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale notice many things. The stove is broken. Minnie's clothing is shabby. Mrs. Hale remembers Minnie as a young girl. She was pretty and cheerful then, always singing, but in these past years, she has kept to herself, perhaps embarrassed by her clothes. Mrs. Peters can sympathize with Minnie's loneliness.

The women continue to explore from their unique female perspective, and they notice the uneven stitching on Minnie's quilt. This is unusual, and they know it reveals agitation. They also see an empty, broken birdcage. A bit later, they find a dead canary among Minnie's sewing things, and they realize that Minnie's husband must have ripped open the cage's door and wrung the bird's neck in a fit of anger. They understand that Minnie has been emotionally abused, and Mrs. Hale remembers what she felt like when a boy once killed her kitten.

All of these things seem like mere trifles, but the women understand their importance, and together they add up to the motive the men are seeking. Yet the women say nothing. The men would merely laugh at them anyway, judging their perspective to be silly. So Mrs. Hale puts the bird in her coat pocket, and she and Mrs. Peters allow the men to struggle with their own faulty perspective.

What is the main theme in "A Jury of Her Peers"?

Susan Glaspell’s short story “A Jury of Her Peers” contains several themes surrounding gender roles. The story centers on Minnie Wright, a housewife who is accused of killing her husband. As the story unfolds, the men of the town search the house for proof of her guilt, while the women realize she’s been abused by her husband and killed him out of self-defense.

The different reactions to the murder represent the different roles men and women often play in society. The men, upon arrival, quickly ignore the kitchen, the room most associated with women, and quickly move upstairs to gather evidence.

"Nothing here but kitchen things," he said, with a little laugh for the insignificance of kitchen things.

They mock Minnie’s concerns over her canning ("Well, can you beat the women! Held for murder, and worrying about her preserves!"), wondering how she could be worried over such a minute issue while facing death charges. Clearly, the men do not recognize the work of a woman as actual work. It is the women who are able to find the evidence proving Minnie’s guilt. They recognize her worn clothes as a sign of her husband’s stinginess. They reminisce that neither of them had visited Minnie over the past twenty years because they were afraid of her husband’s temper. When they notice her birdcage is empty, and then her dead bird, strangled in almost the same way her husband was, they realize that she was the one who killed Harry.

"But, Mrs. Peters!" cried Mrs. Hale. "Look at it! Its neck—look at its neck! It's all—other side to."
She held the box away from her.
The sheriff's wife again bent closer.
"Somebody wrung its neck," said she, in a voice that was slow and deep.

They hide the bird from the men, who give up when they realize they have no evidence.

In the story, the men mock their wives and ignore what they consider to be trivial details. Even though Minnie did commit the crime, by ignoring the details and the women, they miss the needed evidence to convict her.

I would say that one of the major themes in the play is how voices on the outside can actually be useful to all of our narratives.  The women in the play are discredited and marginalized as not having anything worthwhile in contributing to the crime.  Yet, it is through their own insight that the case is solved.  At each step of their understanding of the crime, the patriarchal male establishment attempts to further malign them and silence them.  By the end of the play, one of the resounding messages is that those who have been marginalized can incorporate worthwhile thoughts to the discourse that envelops all of us.  It is a strong statement against the practice of silencing voices and denigrating one’s own experience.  In the process, there is a strong claim of inclusion and seeking to make things better by including more voices into the discussion.

One theme that this story supports is the idea of the importance of having one's own peers act as judges.  The women of the story, because they are women, have a deeper understanding of Minnie's motivations for murdering her husband than the men of the town.  After conducting their own investigation which involves noticing Minnie's uneven stitching and her dead canary, the women realize that she was trapped in a miserable marriage with a man who abused her.  The women hide the evidence that might lead the men to convict her of murder, because they believe that even though she probably killed her husband that she herself did not deserve to be punished.  So the women in the town act as both judge and jury in their own private way.

Out of the many different themes present in the story, the one from which all stem is the repression brought by social expectations due to imposed gender roles. Just like in the first-published one-act play Trifles, the female characters in A Jury of her Peerswere women who were socially thought of as second -class citizens. Minnie was a woman that was psychologically and presumably physically battered. Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters were wives whose husbands forbade from giving input or opinions that would in any case agree with Minnie's actions against her husband. Moreover they even criticize Minnie's house for not being tidy enough  for many other things that, in the men's opinion, did not render Minnie as a good enough wife. They did not once pondered upon what may have made this woman lose so much of herself.

What is the rising action in "A Jury of Her Peers"?

The rising action is where the central conflict of the story gains in momentum and tension. It precedes the climax, where the conflict comes to a head.

In "A Jury of Her Peers," the rising action consists of the search for evidence in the Wright farmhouse. While the men conduct what they think is a thorough search, the women (both of them farmwives who knew Minnie Wright) go through Minnie's domestic things, trying to find out if and why she killed her husband. Looking at the elements of women's daily life that the men see as unimportant, such as sewing work and canned fruit, they discover that Minnie was neglected by her coldhearted husband, who could not even bother to give her the money to buy new clothes. The tension builds as the women reconstruct Minnie's miserable situation from the details in her home, and the men subsequently say the women are wasting time on trifling matters.

The rising action ends when the women realize why Minnie killed her husband. Minnie had a songbird as a companion, and her husband deliberately broke its neck. As a result, Minnie strangled her husband to death with a knotted rope in his sleep.