Events

Rebels in Corsets: The Embodied Rhetoric of the Women’s Suffrage Movement

The story of the women’s suffrage movement is often told (even by US historians) as a peaceful transition by which white male politicians happily gave women the right to vote. This could not be further from the truth. The movement for women’s suffrage was a 72-year struggle that demanded a great deal from women emotionally, politically, and physically. This lecture looks at what it was like to be a woman in the 19^th century with little power to change her circumstances because she did not have access to the ballot box, how it was that women became convinced in the 1840s that it was time to take on that struggle, and how they finally won it through rhetorical strategies that might not look radical to us now but then appeared so radical as to have been called “disgusting.”

Susan Trollinger is professor of English at the University of Dayton where she teaches courses on writing and rhetoric. She earned her Bachelor’s degree in Communication Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her Master’s and PhD in Rhetoric and Communication from the University of Pittsburgh. Her first book, Selling the Amish: The Tourism of Nostalgia (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), explores Amish Country tourism especially in eastern Ohio. In her more than ten years of research for the book, she learned a great deal about Amish culture and its significance for all who are not Amish, which she enjoys sharing with others. Her second book, titled Righting America at the Creation Museum (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016) and co-authored with her husband, William Vance Trollinger, Jr., provides a close reading of the arguments and appeals at the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky as well as situates those arguments and appeals within the long history of Protestant fundamentalism in the US. She has been interviewed in a number of media outlets including CSpan-2’s BookTV, RadioWest, the Washington Post, and GQ.

This event is sponsored by the Washington County Public Library, and is FREE and open to the public.

This program is made possible, in part, by Ohio Humanities and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this (publication/program/exhibition/website) do not necessarily represent those of Ohio Humanities or the National Endowment for the Humanities.