The story of the women’s suffrage movement is often oversimplified as a peaceful transition in which male politicians willingly extended the right to vote to women. In reality, it was a 72-year battle that demanded extraordinary persistence, sacrifice, and creativity. This lecture explores what it was like to be a woman in the 19th century with little power to shape her own circumstances, how women in the 1840s came to believe it was time to fight for the ballot, and the rhetorical strategies they employed to win it. Though these strategies may not seem radical today, at the time they were dismissed as shocking and even “disgusting.” The struggle for suffrage was as much about changing minds and challenging cultural norms as it was about changing the law, and it reshaped American democracy in the process.

About the Speaker

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), examines Amish Country tourism, particularly in eastern Ohio, and its broader cultural implications. Her second book, Righting America at the Creation Museum (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), co-authored with her husband William Vance Trollinger, Jr., provides a close reading of the arguments presented at the Creation Museum in Kentucky and situates them within the long history of Protestant fundamentalism in the U.S.

She has been interviewed by numerous media outlets including C-Span2’s BookTV, RadioWest, the Washington Post, and GQ.

Program Details

This event is free and open to the public. Doors open at 6:30 PM, and the program begins at 7:00 PM. The lecture will be held in the CRF Museum Lecture Hall.