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Like Mrs. Hale, Mrs. Peters can easily perceive the clues that implicate Minnie for the murder, but she is more conflicted about how to respond. At the beginning of the play, Mrs. Peters is described as a “slight and wiry woman” with a “thin nervous face,” which is consistent with her reluctance to question authority. Early on, she seems resigned to her lower social status as a woman, making halfhearted excuses for the men when Mrs. Hale complains to her about their chauvinistic comments. As an outsider who did not previously know the Wrights, Mrs. Peters is reluctant to pass judgment and feels uncomfortable when Mrs. Hale starts repairing the stitching in Minnie’s quilt, which could compromise the crime scene. Yet she does not intervene or inform her husband, the Sheriff, or the County Attorney.  

As the evidence begins to mount, Mrs. Peters seems torn between her duty to uphold “the law,” as personified by her husband and the other men, and her sympathy for Minnie as an oppressed woman. After the discovery of the dead canary, both women seem to realize why Minnie killed John Wright, but Mrs. Peters insists that they cannot really know anything. However, her empathy for Minnie grows when she recalls the loneliness she felt after losing her first child, as well as the rage she felt toward a cruel boy who killed her pet kitten right before her eyes. These traumatic memories help Mrs. Peters begin to see herself in Minnie. Near the end of the play, when the County Attorney jests that Mrs. Peters is “married to the law,” Mrs. Peters replies that she never thought of it quite that way before. Ultimately, she decides to subvert the law—and her husband—by conspiring with Mrs. Hale to conceal the evidence against Minnie.  

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