Rhetorical Analysis Of Speech By Florence Kelley

The early 1900s was a time of great strikes over fierce nationalism, social activism, and protest. Florence Kelley, a United States social worker and reformer, spoke out against child labor and the horrible conditions that children were required to bear in order to feed their families. Her speech, delivered before the convention of the National American Woman Suffrage Association in Philadelphia on July 22, 1905, successfully improved conditions for working children. The language Kelley uses in this speech establishes herself as a leader who has the same values and goals as her audience, but also creates a sense of culpability and sympathy from the many mothers and women in the convention in order to gain their support in her cause. In Kelley’s

As Kelley describes the rapidly increasing wage earning class of young girls, she uses parallel structure and repetition as she says that men, women, youth, and boys all “increase” (115). Asserting that age is not relevant in this work force by grouping men, women, and children all in the same list, Kelley is able to highlight the difference between these categories and make it seem unfair to her audience that they should all be thrown into the same work force. Using an oxymoron to describe how working all night may be beneficial for one person and unfortunate for another, she refers to the child’s work as a “pitiful privilege” (116). The contrasting nature of these two words emphasize the fact that work is inevitably something that must be done and while it is a privilege for men and women to have work to earn money, it is pitiful for children to bear the burden of this responsibility as they are so young. Expanding on this connection between the lives of the children and her audience, Kelley uses a hypothetical example of a child carrying “her pail of midnight luncheon” while an adult could carry “their midday luncheon” (116). This ultimately creates an emotional link between her audience of largely aristocratic women to her subject of a laboring child, and by establishing this

As her audience is vulnerable and wanting to clear their consciousness of their wrongdoings, they then feel that the only way to do so is by joining Kelley in her cause to fight against the injustice of child labor. At the climax of her speech in which she informs her audience of how they can free their consciences, Kelley wisely chooses this point to say that in order to free the children, they must “enlist the workingmen voters” (117). Here, Kelley takes advantage of the desperation of her audience after they have been hit with the emotions brought on by the previous parts of Kelley’s speech. If she had asked the strong, independent women in the audience to enlist the help of men at the beginning of the speech, they would have most likely recoiled at the thought. But by building up to this request with playing on her audience’s emotions to make them feel as if the issue of child labor is their responsibility, Kelley is able to cover the issue of asking for the help of men by prioritizing the lives of the