Summary Of Speech By Florence Kelley Ap Language

How did you spend your 14th birthday? Imagine instead waking up extremely early to work in a factory that is very dangerous. That is how many young kids spent countless birthdays, and agonized mothers had finally had enough. United States social worker, Florence Kelley, in her speech she delivered at the convention of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, highlights the fact that the laws and regulations in our country need to be modified. Kelley’s purpose was to expose the unruly laws and inspire her audience to join in on the actions being taken. She adopts a cautionary tone in order to instill knowledge and raise awareness in women and the voting men by using passionate diction, comparative syntax, and rhetorical questions. Kelly starts her speech by using metonymy when saying “[w]e have, in this country, two million children under the age of sixteen years who are earning their bread”. By using this, she is able to make the money being earned a negative, supporting her objective. The audience is able to assume that by the children “earning their bread” they are then earning their right to eat. Kelley also uses strong words to display the negativity in the entire subject. She uses words like “pitiful privilege”, “robbed”, “little beasts of burden”. By using these …show more content…
She shows a light and dark when she talks about a young girl “carrying her pail of midnight luncheon” when older and happier people “carry their midday luncheon”. By placing these two sentences next to each other, she creates a juxtaposition to show the happiness and sadness in each statement. This brings out the “midnight luncheon” as the understatement and makes it seem much worse. She then continues to use an oxymoron to show that although the child is making a profit, child labor truly is a “great evil”. This effective way of writing creates powerful