Cleo Redd Fisher Museum welcomes Trollinger for women’s suffrage lecture

The Cleo Redd Fisher Museum’s speaker series returns with Rebels in Corsets: The Embodied Rhetoric of the Women’s Suffrage Movement, presented by Susan Trollinger Monday, Feb. 9, in the museum’s lecture hall. Doors open at 6:30 p.m., with the program beginning at 7 p.m.

The program challenges the common perception that women’s suffrage was achieved through a quiet and orderly political process. Instead, Trollinger explores the movement as a 72-year struggle that required persistence, sacrifice and strategic creativity. It will consider what life was like for women in the 19th century, how reformers in the 1840s came to believe it was time to demand the vote and the rhetorical strategies they used to persuade a resistant public. Trollinger says that though many of these arguments appear unremarkable today, they were once viewed as shocking and even “disgusting.” The fight for suffrage reshaped not only the law but American political culture itself.

Trollinger is a professor of English at the University of Dayton. She holds a bachelor’s degree in communication arts from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and a master’s degree and Ph.D. in rhetoric and communication from the University of Pittsburgh. Trollinger is the author of "Selling the Amish: The Tourism of Nostalgia" (2012), which examines Amish Country tourism in eastern Ohio, and co-author of "Righting America at the Creation Museum" (2016). She has been interviewed by national media outlets, including C-SPAN2’s BookTV, RadioWest, The Washington Post and GQ.

Admission to the lecture is free. For more information, visit www.crfmuseum.com or call 419-994-4050.