Could you say the two women had a sort of "enlightenment" experience? How so or how not?

In Susan Glaspell's "A Jury of Her Peers," Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters both experience an enlightenment not only about the suspect Minnie Foster but also about themselves. When the story opens, both women bow to the dominance of their husbands. It seems that Mrs. Peters has been forced to go the "crime" scene by her husband, and Mrs. Hale—hesitant to leave her messy kitchen behind—also gives in to her husband and the sheriff when they insist that she accompanies Mrs. Peters. This opening scene with the male characters' patronizing attitude toward the two women demonstrates the typical relationship that exists between not only husbands and wives in the story's setting but also between males and females in general in the community—men run the show, and women comply, even if they do so in begrudging silence.
However, readers know from Mrs. Hale's thoughts early on that she is far from someone who will think whatever she is told to think. She carefully watches the men as they "investigate" the scene at Minnie's house. As she observes, she begins her own inventory of what might have occurred and how Minnie's husband might have died. Mrs. Peters, who is noticeably not as bold as Mrs. Hale by nature, follows Mrs. Hale's lead. Their enlightenment begins when Mrs. Hale finds Minnie's dead bird and Mrs. Peters observes that someone "wrung its neck." The narrator notes that

the eyes of the two women met—this time clung together in a look of dawning comprehension, of growing horror.

While the women don't want the men to be correct about Minnie's killing her husband, they're beginning to see that she most likely did so and, at this point, are already identifying a motive in their minds. Without much opportunity for conversation, the women begin separately and silently deciding what they will do with the evidence they have discovered. Each woman can put herself in Minnie's isolated, harsh environment and empathize with her. Each woman—without speaking to the other—comes to the conclusion that she must hide Minnie's guilt from the males. Near the story's end, when the more reticent Mrs. Peters makes her choice to participate in a "cover-up," she

turn[s] her head until her eyes [meet] the eyes of the other woman. There was a moment when they held each other in a steady, burning look in which there was no evasion or flinching.

As the men speak all their thoughts and assumptions out loud, the women silently side with Minnie and find that in doing so, they are staging their own form of independence from their male-dominated society—an independence which involves the realization that justice doesn't mean kowtowing to the men in their lives and abandoning one of their "peers."