One of the many social issues in the early twentieth century involved child labor. Florence Kelley, a United States social worker and reformer, fought successfully for child labor laws as well as improving conditions for working women. Her 1905 speech to the National American Woman Suffrage Association possessed a powerful message towards freeing the children who suffer hours of work producing products for the people to use. She captured her audience by helping them realize the difficulties children faced day and night and presented the solution to the problem. Kelley precisely weaved her rhetorical strategies together with ethos, pathos, and logos to deliver an inspiring speech and furthermore submit a solution that would help children in the present and future. One of the many effective ways Kelley persuaded her audience involved syntax. She effectively presented an ethical appeal by providing short sentences that provided parallelism and patterns to help her audience feel the significance within her message. In the second paragraph she states, “Men increase, women increase, youth increase, boys increase in the ranks of the breadwinners; but no contingent so doubles from census period to census period as does the contingent of girls …show more content…
She uses this strategy frequently within her speech to evoke empathy. Multiple times she mentions how little girls work every night in the mills. In paragraph three she states, “Tonight while we sleep, several thousand little girls will be working in textile mills, all the night through,” and once again in paragraph four she states, “While we sleep, little white girls will be working tonight in the mills those states, working eleven hours at night.” This makes the audience imagine young girls suffering as they work night after night in the mills, and Kelley echoes this thought through their minds over and over again creating sympathy towards the
Florence Kelley employs the use of rhetorical devices such as consistent repetition and the continual use of symbolism, in order to promote the reform of child labor, while indirectly pushing the enfranchisement of women.
Florence Kelley, an active social worker and reformer of the 20th century, rants over the horrendous working conditions kids must endure. She presents this in her speech before National American Woman Suffrage Association in Philadelphia, which provides context and credibility for her argument. Kelley argues clearly of the terrible conditions and work hours kids suffer to bring about her message of, “enlisting the workingmen voters.” This is essentially to free the kids from the disastrous issue through her usage of credibility, empathetic tone to strike the audience, and her usage of examples of their conditions and state rules to support her message and purpose.
But, before she brings this up, she first convinces her audience just how excruciatingly terrible child labor is. Kelley focuses on children working long hours through the night, saying, “tonight while we sleep…working all night long.” She then goes on to repeat the phrases, “while we sleep,” and, “all night long,” various times throughout the core of her speech. The emphasis on children working through the night appeals to the audience’s pathos; it includes the listeners in the force enslaving children, making them accountable. While the audience sleeps in the comfort of their homes, young girls spend all night working to make products for them to enjoy. The sorrowful repetition gains the listener’s sympathy for the speaker’s cause. Lastly, Florence Kelley demonstrates ironic diction in her attempt to persuade her spectators to ally with her campaign. The speaker says, “boys and girls…enjoy the pitiful privilege,” to describe young children going off to their jobs instead of to their playdates. The use of the contradictory phrase “pitiful privilege,” reminds the audience that the privilege of having a job, earning a living, becomes a burden when forced on these young
In Florence Kelley’s speech delivered to the National American Woman Suffrage Association in 1905, the author employs empathetic repetition, strong facts, and piteous diction to inspire as many people as possible to work against child labor.
Throughout her speech, Florence Kelly uses her diction to create imagery and convey her point. An example of this in Kelly’s speech is lines 18-22 where she says “ Tonight while we sleep, several thousand little girls will be working in textile mills, all night through, in the deafening noise of the spindles and the looms spinning and weaving cotton and wool, silks and ribbons for us to buy.”(Kelly, 10). With attention to the word choice, Florence Kelly creates an image of a small girl working long into the night, making goods for people to buy, while the adults are at home sleeping in their beds. In this excerpt, she uses the three main phrases, while we sleep, little girls and deafening noise to help the reader picture what is happening with
Florence Kelley was a United States social worker and reformer who fought successfully for child labor laws and improved conditions for working women. Throughout her speech to the Philadelphia Convention of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, she stresses the importance of changing the working conditions that are in place for children. By using child labor as her baseline, Kelley is able to talk about her main point, which is her suggestion for women’s rights with the help of repetition, strong word choice, and opposition.
Florence Kelley was born on September 12, 1859 in Philadelphia and she would later become a famous child welfare advocate and social reformer. She was born to U.S. congressman William Darrah Kelley, who was a founding member of the Republican party, a radical deconstructionist, and an abolitionist. When Kelley was a child her father would take her to see the young boys working at the factories in dangerous conditions, to teach her about child laborers. Through her fathers influence and reading various books of her father’s on social reform, human rights and slavery, Kelley focused on advocacy for child labor reform. In 1876, Kelley enrolled at Cornell University and a few years later, moved to Europe and attended the University of Zürich. While
There are many ways that Florence Kelley uses rhetorical devices to convey her message about child labor to her audience. One way that she does this is through appealing to the audience’s emotion. Kelly states that”... while we sleep little white girls will be working tonight in the mills those states, working eleven hours at night”(Kelly). This appeals to emotion because the thought of a little girl working in a dangerous mill, while others are sleep is sad and depressing. Another reason that this is part of the text appeals to emotion during this time frame she gave the speech is because the thought of a little “white girl” working in the Mills was more important and more appealing than a little black girl
Kelley accentuates white girls in hopes that her audience will imagine their own daughters in a similar situation and feel they are to blame. Throughout the first half of her speech, Kelley uses rhetorical devices to elicit the feelings of sympathy, remorse, and pity to persuade her audience. Using extensive details, she illustrates the harsh reality of what the children go through. She expresses that tonight while they sleep “several thousand little girls will be working in textile mills, all the night through, in the deafening noise of spindles and the looms spinning and weaving cotton and wool, silks and ribbons” for the audience to buy. She intentionally mentions items of necessity and luxury to relate to the poor and wealthier people she is speaking to. She uses rhetorical stances to emphasize her point by listing all the items the children make throughout the night that her audience members have most likely previously purchased. Going into detail that “the children make [their] shoes in the shoe factories; they knit [their] stockings, [their] knitted underwear” and continues by adding that they are “little beast of burden, robbed of the school life” so they can work instead. With these rhetorical stances, she evokes the feeling of guilt within her audience. By painting this picture, she reveals the grim truth that these children are forced to live by due to the
In America, there used to be unfair laws and regulations regarding labor. Children are put to work in harsh conditions, conditions often deemed difficult even for adults, and are forced to work ridiculous hours. Florence Kelley gave a speech at the National American Woman Suffrage Association in Philadelphia on July 22, 1905. In her speech, Kelley uses repetition, pathos, imagery, logos, and carefully placed diction to express how child labor is morally wrong and inhumane.
In Florence Kelley’s speech before the convention of the National American Woman Suffrage Association in Philadelphia on July 22, 1905, she argues that there are millions of young children working under harsh conditions that is not acceptable in human nature. Kelley promotes an end to child labor by utilizing pathos and repetition in her speech to strengthen her claim. By stating out facts, she compares the conditions of young boys and girls with healthy men in order to emphasize about child abuse and to encourage her audience to stand with her to fight for child labor laws.
Child labor and poverty are inevitably bound together and if you continue to use the labor of children as the treatment for the social disease of poverty, you will have both poverty and child labor to the end of time.”
Without the stand Hine and the NCLC took, the U.S. would lack its 21st century stance as a “political superpower” or as a role model for the West. The U.S. was capable of receiving its prestigious titles because it has minimal social unrest. In 1938 when the Fair Labor Standards Act was passed, the first time child labor had been regulated under federal law, the social unrest to implicate laws had finally ended (Herring). Children were now being prioritized and once again, a new America had been founded. It now cared about its future, as it reserved children precious time for school (Koppelman). Without these laws tightening the qualifications to work, children would still be a part of the workforce today, and American society would mirror those of third world countries (Tokonaga). In addition, the U.S. would not have gained its title as “land of the free.” For instance, freedom was not a concept young laboring girls were familiar with. “The young women sleep upon an average six in a room, three beds to a room. There is no privacy, no retirement, here… it seemed such an atrocious violation of one of the faculties of the human soul, the sense of hearing” (Female Workers of Lowell). This scramble to end child labor concluded with the enactment of child labor laws. Though one may argue that a successful economy is the ultimate solvent for child labor, without child labor laws would the nation not be awakened with a
The Social Justice section in Chapter 21 drew my attention. As in the modern day social reform or laws are usually always due to the pressure of public opinion. A Facebook rant after a major disaster can gain major momenta and sway law makers over night. Women (Christian women) had such a huge play in the social reform and gave rights to all Christians either a child, woman, or one of the many ethnic groups. The awareness the National Child Labor Committee was able to bring to the public of the conditions and wages of children in the work force through their, “decade-long pictorial campaign to educate American on the plight of children working in factories.”
Throughout time, women have been considered housewives and mothers. Not all women stayed home, throughout history women have worked, mainly clerical jobs, teaching, charity workers, and other less demanding physical work. It was never a new thing that women were in the work force, it was the impact the propaganda posters and WWII made on the women in that workforce. This propaganda poster; titled “We Can Do It” features a beautiful women with her arm flexed and she is in her work coveralls, above her it say “We can do it.” the author is J. Howard Miller, he uses pathos and ethos to inspire a social movement that increased the number of working women, and changed the face of the workforce.