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Florence Kelley Speech On Child Labor

Decent Essays

Florence Kelley, in her 1905 speech to the National American Woman Suffrage Association, condemns that “while we sleep,” labor practices in the United States force young children into cruel, inhumane working conditions. Kelley illuminates the harsh reality of child labor by utilizing shocking statistics, creating forceful emotional appeals to detail a bleak visual of the grueling working conditions, and juxtaposing both the way girls spend their time and the current laws between states. Kelley’s purpose is to inspire women to fight for the right to vote, believing that enfranchisement will lead to improvements in society, including the reformation of child labor practices. Kelley’s ostensible audience is the voting class of America because she closes her speech by offering to “enlist the workingmen voters” to join the fight against child labor in an enraged and persuasive tone. Kelley commences her speech by providing a shocking statistic that “two million children under the age of sixteen years” strenuously work to support themselves and their families in order to create a forceful sense of emotion within her audience. By doing this she illuminates the rate of child labor to stress the severity of the problem. The author repeats “increase” to emphasize and describe that the American workforce is increasingly composed of girls/women in order to highlight their role and the growth of their participation in the workforce. Juxtaposing how girls spend their time with how

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