Susan Glaspell wrote in a time when women were supposed to be submissive to the men of the society, especially their husbands. She bucked the system and fought traditional gender roles with her plays, short stories and essays. Susan Glaspell was born in 1882 in Davenport, Iowa. She led a rather uneventful childhood. She attended Drake University in Des Moines where she received her Ph.D. in Philosophy. Before becoming an author, she was a reporter for the Des Moines Daily News. She married her husband George Cook in 1913 and together they founded the experimental Provincetown Players, a theatre group managed by artists, created to present plays written by new artists (Hunter, Paul A80). In 1931, Glaspell received the Pulitzer Prize for her play Alisons House, a play about the life of Emily Dickinson. She is one of only two women to receive a Pulitzer. She is also well know for her play Trifles and its sister short story A Jury of Her Peers. In all Glaspell wrote fourteen plays, nine novels and over fifty short stories, articles and essays (Carpentier 92).The play for which she is most recognized is Trifles. Trifles is a murder mystery that explores the oppression women felt during the twenties. The main characters are the middle-aged wives of the investigator, Mrs.Peters and the wife of the witness Mrs. Hale. We get a sense of the domination these women dealt with early in the story when the key witness was talking to the investigator about Mr. Wright, the dead husband, and a party phone he was interested in investing in. Mr. Wrights comment about the party line was, folks talk too much anyway and all he asked was peace and quiet(Glaspell 1330). This begins to show the domination of his wife by keeping her silent and at home. This turns out to be the case, as later in the play we find out that because Mrs. Wright had no children, she had a bird to sing to her, and when she was single, she loved to sing. She sang so well...
