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.

A major theme in "A Jury of Her Peers" is crime and punishment. While Minnie may have committed the murder of her husband, she is tried and found not guilty by the women who visit her home. By combining what they know of Minnie and John with the clues they find in the house, they determine that she doesn't deserve to be punished. Her punishment was having to live with her husband, and she's already served it. His crime was abusing his wife, and his murder is a fair punishment.

The nature of the case would be straightforward in a traditional court. John killed her pet, so Minnie murdered him. His actions would not constitute a serious crime, and she would be punished for murder. However, Martha and Mrs. Peters don't see things that way. They both relate to Minnie. Martha had a kitten that was killed by a boy when she was a child. Mrs. Peters experienced a time when she was isolated and alone while raising children. They're both able to relate to what Minnie was going through.

The men who are investigating don't care about or understand the female perspective. Both women know that they'd be mocked or disregarded if they stepped into the investigation. They sift through the evidence, and each determines that Minnie doesn't deserve further punishment and that, if her actions were a crime, they weren't an unforgivable one. This is clear at the moment when they hide the evidence they found from their husbands.

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.

The main theme in the story is the gender roles of the men and women. The men are there as the legal representatives to determine what happened, but it is their wives who are able to determine much more about what happened because they notice things their husbands are blind to. The men leave the kitchen, remarking that there's "nothing here but kitchen things", but the women are able to determine Mrs. Wright's frame of mind by how she left her kitchen. When the men see as "trifles", the women see as significant clues. Since both of the women hae been farmers' wives themselves, they understand the isolation Mrs. Wright must have felt and how the event of her dead canary would upset her.

The attitude of the men show their bias of how they view women. The attorney jokes about them keeping their eyes open in case they come upon a clue, and the sheriff responds they wouldn't recognize it as a clue anyway. The women are not respected by their husbands for their minds. Their place is in the home doing the typical "wifely" duties.

In the end, only the two women can understand how Mrs. Wright felt and how she was treated by her husband. They see her worn clothes, the awful stove she had to cook on, and that her husband would never buy her a telephone to relieve her loneliness. The men will never understand this part of Mrs. Wright's life.

The main theme for A Jury of Her Peers is Gender Roles; much of the tension in the story results from what the women understand and what the men are blind to. The kitchen, during the time the story takes place, was the sole domain of the wife. Wives themselves, Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters are able to determine Mrs. Wright's frame of mind from how she left her kitchen. The men are scornful of the messy kitchen, and ultimately dismissive of what it contains. The sheriff comments that there's "nothing here but kitchen things," and when Mrs. Peters laments that the jars of preserves have burst from the cold, Mr. Hale says that' 'women are used to worrying over trifles." Yet the women know that Mrs. Wright would not choose to have such a shabby or ill-kept kitchen. When the attorney notices the filthy dish towels and says, "Not much of a housekeeper, would you say, ladies?" Mrs. Hale replies that "Those towels get dirty awful quick. Men's hands aren't always as clean as they might be." The stark divisions between men's and women's roles is noted by Mrs. Hale, who says "I'd hate to have men comin' into my kitchen ... snoopin' round andcriticizin'." Such an attitude towards women in the room of the house they know best highlights not only the differences between men's and women's household roles, but also that the women's role is devalued by men.
Follow the link below for more detailed information on the theme. Hope this helps.

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.