American theatre owes a great debt to Susan Glaspell...for she dared envision and bring to life onstage her own New Women. These women experience their own anarchy, challenging and rejecting male-defined norms, including such concepts as woman's honor, abstract justice, and the male's right to dominate and control, while they move toward the formation of female community (Burke 63).
             Sally Burke is not the only critic that considers Susan Glaspell a heroine regarding her active commitment to women. To her acknowledgment, Glaspell has written thirteen plays, fourteen novels, and fifty short stories, articles and essays. In 1931, Susan Glaspell became only the second woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Alison's House. Nevertheless, she is most renowned as one of the first women playwrights that advocate the women's suffrage movement. In her play, Trifles, Glaspell exposes her audience to the way that women were treated in her time. The central theme of sexual tension between men and women is evident throughout the work, as well as apparent in her everyday life. In Glaspell's day, the "American stage had few women characters that were as vibrant, strong, and rebellious as those she created in the teens and twenties" (Malpede 146). Thus, her characters of Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters are intelligent, strong and comparable to the women of her time, alt!
             hough society viewed women as inferior to men. Trifles attempts to explain Susan Glaspell's attitude towards sexism and the public's view of women, as well as her commitment to the women's movement for social change and justice.
             Initially, Glaspell's women are strong, rebellious and intelligent. The dialogue that Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters use in the play frequently has a hidden meaning that the male characters are portrayed to not recognize. These extremely clever quotes are Glaspell's way of revealing the female&apo...