y
introduced Miss Barton, who said:

Madam President, Ladies and Delegates: Among many honors which
from time to time have been tendered me by my generous country
people, not one has been more appreciated than the privilege of
giving this word of public welcome to the honored delegation of
women present with us.

Ladies of Europe, if a hundred tongues were mine they could not
speak the glad welcome in our hearts. It is an epoch in the
history of the world that your coming marks. For the first time
within the written history of mankind have the women of the
nations left their homes and assembled in council to declare the
position of women before the world, bringing to national and
international view the injustice and the folly of the barriers
which ignorance has created and tradition fostered and preserved
through the unthinking ages until they came to be held not only
as a part of the natural laws and rights of man but as the
immutable decrees of Divinity itself.... If woman alone had
suffered under these mistaken traditions, if she could have borne
the evil by herself, it would have been less pitiful, but her
brother man, in the laws he created and ignorantly worshipped,
has suffered with her. He has lost her highest help; he has
crippled the intelligence he needed; he has belittled the very
source of his own being and dwarfed the image of his Maker.

Ladies, there is a propriety in your crossing the seas to hold
the first council in America, for it was in this new untrammeled
land of freedom, free birth, free thought and free speech that
the first outspoken notes were given, the first concerted action
taken toward the release of woman, the enlightenment of man as a
lawmaker, and the attention of the world directed to the
injustice, unwisdom and folly of the code under which it lived.
It was here that the first hard blows were struck. It was here
the paths were marked out that have been trodden with bleeding
feet for half a century, until at length the blows no longer
rebound and the hands of the grateful, loving womanhood of the
world struggle for a place to scatter roses in the paths which
erstwhile were flint and thorns; and an admiring world of women
and men alike breathe in tones of respect, gratitude and love the
names of Eliza