Rhetorical Analysis Of Speech By Florence Kelley

Florence Kelly, a passionate social worker and reformer, was an avid fighter for the improvement of child labor laws and women's working conditions. At the Convention of the National American Women Suffrage Association on July 22, 1905, she gave a powerful speech to her audience to reveal why child labor should be nonexistent. In this speech, Kelly uses her ability to invoke sadness and guilt, speaks as one of the privileged people compared to the working children, and gives solutions to the problem of child labor to acquire the audience's attention.

Kelley makes several comments evoking emotions to the audience of sadness and guilt by emphasizing how the audience is sleeping in their beds at night, while the children are working in factories, and cotton mills: the children are not able to live their childhood because they are fulfilling society's wants and needs. She also expresses anger and irritation because Georgia and New Jersey had no restrictions on child labor laws. Kelly uses a very passionate tone that makes her audience agree with her and hear what she is saying: the reader can tell that she cares about what she is preaching. She expresses great detail about all the tasks that these …show more content…
She is trying to show the adults that they are privileged enough to not go through the hardships that the children are going through, and that they should be trying, like her, to fight against child labor. She states several times that “they make our shoes, they knit our stockings,” trying to show that these children are putting in an excessive amount of hard work for hours at a time to make our commodities, while they are being robbed of their childhoods. She is trying to break the silence of the audience and get them to realize that they are equals and they should be pushing against the plight of child labor, just as she