most of them
had ever heard speak in public. She would be, they reckoned, worth
hearing at least once.

Traveling from town to town, she held meetings every other night.
Usually the postmasters or sheriffs posted her notices in the town
square and gave them to the newspapers and to the ministers to
announce in their churches. Even in a hostile community she almost
always found a gallant fair-minded man to come to her aid, such as the
hotel proprietor who offered his dining room for her meetings when
the court house, schoolhouse, and churches were closed to her, or the
group of men who, when the ministers refused to announce her meetings,
struck off handbills which they distributed at the church doors at the
close of the services. The newspapers too were generally friendly.

As men were the voters with power to change the laws, she aimed to
attract them to her evening meetings, and usually they came, seeking
diversion, and listened respectfully. Some of them scoffed, others
condemned her for undermining the home, but many found her reasoning
logical and by their questions put life into the meetings. A few even
encouraged their wives to enlist in the cause.

The women, on the other hand, were timid or indifferent, although she
pointed out to them the way to win the legal right to their earnings
and their children. It was difficult to find among them a rebellious
spirit brave enough to head a woman's rights society.

"Susan B. Anthony is in town," wrote young Caroline Cowles, a
Canandaigua school girl, in her diary at this time. "She made a
special request that all seminary girls should come to hear her as
well as all the women and girls in town. She had a large audience and
she talked very plainly about our rights and how we ought to stand up
for them and said the world would never go right until the women had
just as much right to vote and rule as the men.... When I told
Grandmother about it, she said she guessed Susan B. Anthony had
forgotten that St. Paul said women should keep silence. I told her,
no, she didn't, for she spoke particularly about St. Paul and said if
he had lived in these times ... he would have been as anxious to have
women at the head of the government as she was. I could not make
Grandmother agree with her at all."[58]

Many of the towns Susan visited were not on a railroad. Often after a
long cold sleigh ride she slept in a hotel room without a fire; in the
morning she might have to break the