To kill a songbird: A community of women, feminist jurisprudence, conscientious objection and revolution in A Jury of Her Peers and contemporary film

In Susan Glaspell's Jury of Her Peers, women's awakening, their feminine bonding, and ideological activism are inseparable from their realization of the gender discrimination and oppression inherent in the existing legal system, and their responsive creation of alternative, feminine justice and judgment. The search for feminist consciousness and the foundation of an informed community of women imply rejection of the legal order as a tool of patriarchal domination, and exploration of feminine legal thought. I suggest that in her 1916 G short story, Glaspell anticipates both legal feminist theory that focuses on dominance, oppression, and resistance,2 and psychological feminist theory that focuses on an ethics of care, women's voice, and feminine networking.3 Further, her narrative offers a uniquely coherent, comprehensive world-view, combining the two perspectives, often perceived as contrasting. Quilting serves as a three-dimensional metaphor for feminine social networking, feminist storytelling, and women's engagement in law (their unique method of piecing evidence together). Quilting thus symbolically mediates between the fundamental structures of feminine community, feminist literature, and feminist legal thought. Introducing jurisprudential rhetoric, I go on to show how Glaspell's literary quilting of feminine communality and feminist legal thinking represents an episode of emerging feminist consciousness as an act of collective "conscientious objection" - if not potential revolution. My essay concludes with the suggestion, based on personal teaching experience, to include Jury in law-school curriculum, together with contemporary feminist films. Significant issues and motifs link Glaspell's short story (and play) with contemporary feminist film. Read with Glaspell's text, feminist films can be seen as modern, influential remakes of her turn-ofthe-twentieth-century work. Such films, as well as their literary predecessor, are powerful teaching materials in twenty-first-century law school curriculum.