Florence Kelley Rhetorical Analysis

Child labor laws were set into place to protect young children from harsh jobs that would block their educational growth and be a danger to their overall health. Most common during the Industrial Revolution, children worked to provide to their families. Many could not get by with the little amount of money, which meant that most children were sent off to the factories to work. Although this means that the families would be getting by, was it worth the negatives that it brought to children? Florence Kelley disagreed with child labor and spoke out on the possibility of beginning a movement or law to change it. Kelley used the rhetorical techniques logos and pathos, to argue her message, in an attempt to bring people together to obtain child labor laws. When starting her argument, Florence Kelley uses facts and statistics to show the increase of young, female workers. She states, “ No other

She does so by repeating the word “our”. Starting at line 66 she writes, “ The children make our shoes in the shoe factories; they knit our stockings; our knitted underwear in the knitting factories. They spin and weave our cotton underwear in the cotton mills. Children braid straw for our hats, they spin and weave the silk and velvet wherewith we trim our hats” (Kelley 66). The repetition of “our” is meant to remind the audience that the young are working on things we use and need. In a way this is almost blaming the audience, or guilt tripping them, for what child workers go through for the people's’ needs. She continues sparking the powerful use of guilt when she says, “ They carry bundles of garments from the factories to the tenements, little beasts of burden, robbed of school life that they may work for us” (Kelley 75). She wants to audience to understand that that child work is taking away from their childhoods. Kelley wants the reader to compare their lives to those of children