Rhetorical Analysis Of Women's Rights Speech

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Although by 1995 the women’s rights movement had already achieved many of the goals that had plagued them for centuries due to the successes of second wave feminism, around the world women were still a largely marginalized group. In Hillary Clinton’s “Women’s Rights are Human Rights” speech, Clinton realized that members of a marginalized group in society can often put off potential supporters from all walks of life due to their aggressiveness in fighting for reform, and thus decided to take a tone of cautious optimism rather than one of condemnation or rebuke. She used this tone to argue for unity between men and women, and amongst women themselves. She jumps right into this message with a plethora of repetition to build her ethos, evens out …show more content…

The use of repetition in this instance is a device to allow her to build her intrinsic ethos, and to create an ethical appeal to her audience. In paragraph 2, she describes all the places and ways that women come together: “Women come together every day in every country. We come together in fields and factories, in village markets and supermarkets, in living rooms and board rooms. Whether it is while playing with our children in the park, or washing clothes in a river, or taking a break at the office water cooler, we come together and talk about our aspirations and concern.“ She addresses women of every social circumstance and part of the world as to show the objectiveness and understanding nature of her character. This statement builds trust between her and her mostly female audience, because almost all, if not all of her audience will relate themselves to one of those situations. She also uses asyndeton in that passage, when describing the places where women come together. Her exclusion of conjunctions between all the locations and the use of anaphora in the repetition of “we come together” serves to emphasize the countless number of places that women meet globally, which again helps to strengthen her ethos, …show more content…

She starts off this section of the speech by acknowledging that there are some who question the need for The World Conference for Women, and then, in paragraph 5, uses a series of cause-effect statements to dismantle the arguments of that antithetic group: “What we are learning around the world is that if women are healthy and educated, their families will flourish. If women are free from violence, their families will flourish. If women have a chance to work and earn as full and equal partners in society, their families will flourish. And when families flourish, communities and nations do as well.” Her repetition of the “if women...their families will…” sentence structure allows her to emphasize to the audience the multitude of ways in which women matter to communities around the world. By directly connecting the power of women to the success of entire nations, she forces men and women of all circumstances to recognize the importance of women to their lives. In the body of her speech, Clinton establishes her logos by presenting clear facts, and uses inductive reasoning to come to an understandable

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