Shirley Chisholm's Speech Equal Rights For Women

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“…when a young woman graduates from college and starts looking for a job, she is likely to have a frustrating and even demeaning experience ahead of her.” (Chrisholm 1969) This was stated in the oral speech Equal Rights for Women given by Shirley Chisholm. As I read the speech it was easy for me to identify where Shirley was coming from and the side she took on the topic of Women’s Rights. The lack of equality, weather that be with women or the African American race, is an issue. As a woman myself in today’s society she brought to my attention some very valid points. I thought the speech did a good job persuading me toward standing up for equality. Shirley successfully used arguments of parallel case, arguments from generalization and the …show more content…

Arguments from Generalization is defined as the following “This approach to arguing involves the assumption that a particular example, story, or piece of data can be generalized to a larger population...Your reasoning is, essentially, that what happened in one case is likely to be true in other similar cases.” (Nelson 2014) Shirley was able to put this within her speech the entire time. Being the speech’s topic was on women’s rights it was mainly to target and focus on people of the female gender. It is generalizing and implying that every woman in our society is judged and discriminated against. I thought it was interesting that at one point in the speech, Shirley an African American female, stated she was getting discriminated against more as a woman then as an African …show more content…

I think Shirley used this fallacy but not in a negative way. Shirley starts off by focusing on the objective and what she wants her listeners to think about throughout the whole speech. Shirley wanted everyone to know her point and what she believes should happen; which is equality through the Equal Rights Amendment. She then proceeded to state why some individuals may be opposed to the idea and why the amendment has yet to passed. She discusses each of these issues and came up with a response for each one. At the end of the speech Shirley came back to what she wanted people to be thinking of the whole time and restates that she wants equality. I think it is a clever fallacy if used in such a way that Shirley did. (Bennett

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