In spite of these setbacks, Susan still saw great promise in the West
and resumed her lecturing there. She knew the rapidly growing young
western states and territories as few easterners did, and she
understood their people. Here women were making themselves
indispensable as teachers, and state universities, now open to them,
graduated over two thousand women a year. The Farmers' Alliance, the
Grange, and the Prohibition party, all distinctly western in origin,
admitted women to membership and were friendly to woman suffrage.
School suffrage had been won in twelve western states as against five
in the East, and Kansas women were now voting in municipal elections.
In a sense, woman suffrage was becoming respectable in the West, and a
woman was no longer ostracized by her friends for working with Susan
B. Anthony.

Still critical of her own speaking, Susan was often discouraged over
her lectures, but her vitality, her naturalness, and her flashes of
wit seldom failed to win over her audiences. Her nephew, Daniel Jr., a
student at the University of Michigan, hearing her speak, wrote his
parents, "At the beginning of her lecture, Aunt Susan does not do so
well; but when she is in the midst of her argument and all her
energies brought into play, I think she is a very powerful
speaker."[357]

On these trips through the West, she kept in close touch with her
brothers Daniel and Merritt in Kansas, frequently visiting in their
homes and taking her numerous nieces to Rochester. She valued
Daniel's judgment highly, and he, well-to-do and influential, was a
great help to her in many ways, investing her savings and furnishing
her with railroad passes which greatly reduced her ever-increasing
traveling expenses.

Everywhere she met active zealous members of the Women's Christian
Temperance Union. Since the Civil War, temperance had become a
vigorous movement in the Middle West, doing its utmost to counteract
the influence of the many large new breweries and saloons. Through the
Prohibition party, organized on a national basis in 1872, temperance
was now a political issue in Kansas, Iowa, and the Territory of
Dakota, and through the W.C.T.U. women waged an effective
total-abstinence campaign. Brought into the suffrage movement by
Frances Willard under the slogan, "For God and Home and Country,"
these women quickly sensed the value of their votes to the temperance
cause. Nor was Susan slow to recognize their importance to her a