Florence Kelley Against Unfair Child Labor

Florence Kelley was a United States social worker who fought aggressively for child labor laws and the improvement of condition for women workers. Kelley made a speech given to the convention of the National American Woman Suffrage Association on July 22, 1905 in Philadelphia. Her use of appealing to Guilt, emotion, and referring to factual evidence, helps Kelley prove her point in her fight against unfair child labor laws and the injustice to women in the work force. Florence Kelley uses repetition to allow her to appeal to the listener’s sense of guilt too see how unfair the child labor laws were at the time. Kelley begins simply by appealing to her listener’s guilt by saying "No other portion of the wage earning class increased so rapidly from decade to decade as the young girls from fourteen to twenty years…Tonight while we sleep, several thousand little girls will be working in textile mills, all the night through, in the deafening noise of the spindles and the looms spinning and weaving cotton and wool, silks and ribbons for us to buy.” While the American public lies their heads down on their pillow at night these children

She begins by saying “We have, in this country, two million children under the age of sixteen years.” By doing this she gives the audience an actual number making her statement have much more validity. She also gives examples from Georgia, Alabama, North and South Carolina and New Jersey about their labor laws. She gives Alabama the credit of only allowing children to work 8 hours in the cotton mill while Georgia and both Carolinas have no restriction and “while we sleep little white girls will be working eleven hours straight that night.” By showing her knowledge of the laws of other states and giving correct statistics Kelley adds more legitimacy to her speech which allows the audience to be certain of her than they probably would have been