Summary Of While We Sleep By Florence Kelley

Florence Kelley, a women’s rights and child labor activist, delivered a speech to the National American Woman Suffrage Association in July 1905 in which she condemns and details the cruel practices of child labor in the United States. Following the industrial revolution, factories had an increase in job openings and a necessity for small hands to work their machines, and consequently, there was a surge of children in the workforce working the same if not more hours than their adult counterparts. The increase in youth exploitation without restrictions on working time prompted Kelley to speak to the women of NAWSA in an attempt to encourage them to vote against child labor and persuade the workingmen voters to vote against unrestricted child

The cruel laborious nightly tasks performed by young children such as “working in textile mills, all the night through, in the deafening noise of the spindles”(lines 19-20) are put on the conscience of the listeners as Kelley creates within them a feeling of guilt for sleeping on the issue of child exploitation. Kelley uses parallelism to create a feeling of involvement and guilt within the audience, which helps her achieve her purpose of persuading the audience to act against child labor by first and foremost making them feel like they are a part of the problem and therefore need to be a part of the

Kelley often proposes rhetorical questions to the listener to involve them as not only part of the problem, but part of the solution. Kelley helps the reader see the injustices within the voting system which votes on child labor laws by asking them if the Georgia Legislature would have “passed that shameful repeal bill enabling girls of fourteen years to work all night, if the mothers in New Jersey were enfranchised?”(lines 59-62). She then, after explaining how women’s voices are needed in order to reform sweatshops that exploit children, asks the question to the women of NAWSA, “[w]hat can we do to free our consciences?”(line 85), making the listeners themselves think about and want to know what they can do to help. Kelley then tells listeners how they can help; by “enlist[ing] the workingmen voter, with us, in this task of freeing the children from toil”(lines 94-96). Kelley, in inspiring a drive in her audience to rectify the injustices in child labor, and then giving her audience a call to action encompassing exactly what they can do to help, Kelley moves her audience to action in voting and enlisting voters to vote to help free the children from immoral