An American educator, Fetterley is the author of The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction (1978). In the following essay, she discusses how "A Jury of Her Peers" can be interpreted as a story about reading and that the women in the story are more adept at "reading" Minnie Wright's situation than are the men.

As a student of American literature, I have long been struck by the degree to which American texts are self-reflexive. Our "classics" are filled with scenes of readers and readings. In The Scarlet Letter, for example, a climactic moment occurs when Chillingworth rips open Dimmesdale's shirt and finally reads the text he has for so long been trying to locate. What he sees we never learn, but for him his "reading" is complete and satisfying. Or, to take another example, in "Daisy Miller," Winterbourne's misreading of Daisy provides the central drama...