s who had been welcomed as
naturalized, enfranchised citizens and who almost to a man opposed
extending the vote to women. This precedence of foreign-born men over
American women was not only galling to her but menaced, she believed,
the growth of American democracy.

Woman suffrage was defeated in Colorado in 1877, two to one. With the
Chinese coming into the state in great numbers to work in the mines,
the specter that stalked through this campaign was the fear of putting
the ballot into the hands of Chinese women.

From Colorado, Susan moved on to Nebraska with a new lecture, "The
Homes of Single Women." Although she much preferred to speak on "Woman
and the Sixteenth Amendment" or "Bread and the Ballot," she realized
that, in order to be assured of return engagements, she must
occasionally vary her subjects, but she was unwilling to wander far
afield while women's needs still were so great. By means of this new
lecture she hoped to dispel the widespread, deeply ingrained fallacy
that single women were unwanted helpless creatures wholly dependent
upon some male relative for a home and support. Aware that this
mistaken estimate was slowly yielding in the face of a changing
economic order, she believed she could help lessen its hold by
presenting concrete examples of independent self-supporting single
women who had proved that marriage was not the only road to security
and a home. She told of Alice and Phoebe Cary, whose home in New York
City was a rendezvous for writers, artists, musicians, and reformers;
of Dr. Clemence Lozier, the friend of women medical students; of Mary
L. Booth, well established through her income as editor of _Harper's
Bazaar_; and of her beloved Lydia Mott, whose home had been a refuge
for fugitive slaves and reformers.[332]

In Nebraska, she made a valuable new friend for the cause, Clara
Bewick Colby, whose zeal and earnest, intelligent face at once
attracted her. Within a few years, Mrs. Colby established in Beatrice,
Nebraska, a magazine for women, the _Woman's Tribune_, which to
Susan's joy spoke out for a federal woman suffrage amendment.

Because Susan's contract with the Slayton Lecture Bureau allowed no
break in her engagements, she was obliged to leave the Washington
convention of the National Woman Suffrage Association in the hands of
others in 1878. It was much on her mind as she traveled through
Dakota, Minnesota, Missouri, and Kansas, and she sent a check for $100
to help wit