How Does Ben Franklin Use Satire In The Trail Of Miss Polly Baker

In early American History Ben Franklin was known for being a different kind of person. He never followed the rules like everyone else and always “marched to the beat of his own drum”. This difference from everyone else made Franklin a prominent figure in early American society. Franklin also used this to help get his beliefs across subtly. One way he does this is in “The Trail of Miss Polly Baker”. On the surface, this story is just about a women pleading to a jury about the punishments she has been given. People in this society saw this as a little hearted story that was created for entertainment purposes. But if you dive deeper into the text you can see that Ben Franklin is actually using satire to take jabs at how society and the judicial system treats women. In this story he uses satire with a sarcastic tone to help get his point

“What Numbers of procur’d Abortions! and how many distress’d Mothers have been driven, by the Terror of Punishment and public Shame, to imbrue, contrary to Nature, their own trembling Hands in the Blood of their helpless Offspring! Nature would have induc’d them to nurse it up with a Parent’s Fondness. ’Tis the Law therefore, ’tis the Law itself that is guilty of all these Barbarities and Murders.” Franklin writes this to show that mothers of illegitimate child fear the ridicule and punishments that are handed down from the Government of the colonies and jury. In fact, the mothers are willing to have an abortion to terminate the child in order to skip out on the chastisement. He turns the tables on the jury to make them uncomfortable with bringing down punishments on Miss Baker and other mothers who have children out of wedlock. This type of comment is amazing to me because if something like this were to be said in this day in age, it would be shut down immediately due to the fact that it is not politically