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 ice in the pitcher to take the cold sponge bath which nothing could induce her to omit since she had begun to follow the water cure, a new therapeutic method then in vogue.
For a time Ernestine Rose came to her aid and it was a relief to turn over the meetings to such an accomplished speaker. But for the most part Susan braved it alone. Steadily adding names to her petitions and leaving behind the leaflets which Elizabeth Stanton had written, she aroused a glimmer of interest in a new valuation of women.
Parker Pillsbury
On the stagecoach leaving Lake George on a particularly cold day, she found to her surprise a wealthy Quaker, whom she had met at the Albany convention, so solicitous of her comfort that he placed heated planks under her feet, making the long ride much more bearable. He turned up again, this time with his own sleigh, at the close of one of her meetings in northern New York, and wrapped in fur robes, she drove with him behind spirited gray horses to his sisters' home to stay over Sunday, and then to all her meetings in the neighborhood. It was pleasant to be looked after and to travel in comfort and she enjoyed his company, but when he urged her to give up the hard life of a reformer to become his wife, there was no hesitation on her part. She had dedicated her life to freeing women and Negroes and there could be no turning aside. If she ever married, it must be to a man who would encourage her work for humanity, a great man like Wendell Phillips, or a reformer like Parker Pillsbury.
Returning home in May 1855, she took stock of her accomplishments. She had canvassed fifty-four counties and sold 20,000 tracts. Her expenses had been $2,291 and she had paid her way by selling tracts and by a small admission charge for her meetings. She even had seventy dollars over and above all expenses. She promptly repaid the fifty dollars which Wendell Phillips had advanced, but he returned it for her next campaign.
However, her heart quailed at the prospect of another such winter, as she recalled the long, bitter-cold days of travel and the indifference of the women she was trying to help. Even the unfailing praise of her family and of Elizabeth Stanton, even the kindness and interest of the new friends she made paled into insignificance before the thought of another lone crusade. She was exhausted and suffering with rheumatic pains, and yet she would not rest, but prepared for an ambitious convention at Saratoga Springs, then the fashionable summer resort of the East.