On July 22 1905, Florence Kelley gave a speech before the National American Women Suffrage Association addressing child labor laws and the working conditions for women. In her speech Kelley addresses her audience by using a strong appeal to pathos, logos, diction, and a call to action to convince them that a time for change has come. Kelley immediately begins her speech by invoking emotion within her audience. She starts by gaining her audience’s attention with the words “two million children…vary in age from six to seven years…” which is supposed to press her audience, consisting mainly of women, to embrace their maternal instincts and rally up against those who will incite hardships on children. This not only gains the attention of the audience, but also puts the thought into the audience’s mind, that the world they live in allows for their children, who are supposed to be loved and cherished, to be treated with the harshness of reality before their time. Furthermore, Kelley uses logos to provide the audience with …show more content…
She skillfully uses the devices of rhetorical questions and parallelism to stress the importance of her argument. Her use of rhetorical questions provide the audience with thoughts of how their influence such as their votes, as expressed in lines 55-58, could have impacted the result of children under twelve working. The mother’s would protest their daughter’s involvement if it were their daughter’s being targeted specifically, as stated in lines 59-62. From line 66-79, Kelley uses parallelism to emphasize the effect child labor is having on everyone’s lives, not just the children’s when she states how they “make our shoes”, “spin and weave our cotton underwear”, and even “carry bundles of garments from the factories to the tenements” going as far as to call them “little beasts of burden, robbed of school life that they may work for
She wanted to change the law for the unfairness of the children. The text states, “They would march the mill children all the way to the president of the United States-Theodore Roosevelt.” (Josephson, 6). The author explains what she is planning to do to hopefully change the mind of President Roosevelt. The author writes, “Their bodies were bone-thin, with hollow chests.” …”’some with their hands off, some with the thumb missing, some with their fingers off at the knuckles’ - victims of mill accidents.” (Josephson, 5). This means that the children weren’t being fed properly and they were injured while working. Some of the children lost body parts because the job was too
"The National American Association of Woman Suffrage Under Carrie Chapman Catt." National Women's History Museum.org. N.p., n.d. Web. 5 Dec. 2013. .
In Florence Kelley’s 1905 speech to the Philadelphia convention of the National American Women Suffrage Association, she accentuates the obligatory need to reform the working conditions for young children.
Throughout Kelley’s speech, she utilizes imagery to help prove her view that child labor is wrong. She points out that while “we sleep” there are “several thousand little girls… working in the textile mills, all the night through, in the deafening noise of the spindles and the looms spinning and weaving cotton and wool.” The listener of the speech can visualize the dreadful scene in which thousands of little girls are working in the textile mills. This imagery evokes a sense of sorrow from the listener. Also, the word “deafening” adds to the listener’s understanding that not only are young children working, but they are working dangerous and dreadful jobs. She also depicts an image of a girl who “ on her thirteenth birthday” could work from “ six at night until six in the morning.” This detail suggests that there is little happiness in the lives of these young children
Kelley uses the logic brought up by such questions to emphasize how giving women the right to vote is a good vote can help end child labor. Another example of this is her description of a little girl who, “on her thirteenth birthday, could start away from her home at half past five in the afternoon, carrying her pail of midnight luncheon”. The emphasis on the innocence of children portrays the pity and sympathy that the audience should feel. She creates a scenario that seems much too real when she says “The children make our shoes in the shoe factories; they knit our stockings, our knitted underwear.
She was now getting into the field of labor agitation and would change America forever. In 1903, she organized a march in which children, mutilated from their jobs, marched the streets to the home of Theodore Roosevelt in order to draw attention to the grueling and wicked child labor laws. “Federal laws against child labor would not come for decades, but for two months that summer, Mother Jones, with her street theater and speeches, made the issue front-page news.” This shows how after several attempts from previous progressive reformers, Jones was the only one whose protests were powerful and effective enough to open people’s eyes to the issues. A reason that Jones had become so effective was that of her exploration and observations. She frequently visited factories to observe the cruel working conditions in which people worked in and interviewed workers to get a feel for them and understand the brutality of the work. She stated herself that because of rough conditions, “The brain is so crushed as to be incapable of thinking, and one who mingles with these people soon discovers that their minds like their bodies are wrecked. Loss of sleep and loss of rest gives rise to abnormal appetites, indigestion, shrinkage of statue, bent backs and aching hearts.” By examining workplaces, she was able to gather empathy and sympathy for the workers who were suffering.
More than three hundred citizens came to take part in one of the most important documents written in women’s history during the Women’s Right’s Convention in upstate Seneca, New York, led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott on July 19-20, 1848 (Ryder). Stanton became persistent when she included a resolution supporting voting rights for women in the document, intimidated by this notion her loyal husband threatened to boycott the convention. “Even Lucretia Mott warned her, ‘Why Lizzie, thee will make us ridiculous!’ ‘Lizzie,’ however, refused to yield” (Rynder). As Mott dreaded, out of eleven resolutions the most argumentative was the ninth–women’s suffrage resolution. The other 10 resolutions passed consistently. “According to Cady Stanton’s account, most who opposed this resolution did so because they believed it would compromise the others. She, however, remained adamant” (Rynder). When the two-day convention was over, one hundred men and women signed the historical the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments to...
This work was rejected by many of the more conservative elements in the movement and a storm of protest arose as many of her colleagues condemned her. When she dies in 1902, she was no longer the movement’s leader and was unfortunately, not around to see women’s suffrage in the United States. Her crusade lasted for over fifty years of her life, as she learned and profited from her mistakes and failures, realizing that everything isn’t perfect. Even though she has been dead for quite some time now, her concerns, ideas, and accomplishments have endured and continue to influence the feminist movement and other movements for progress in the twentieth century.
"The beginning of the fight for women suffrage is usually traced to the Declaration of Sentiments' produced at the first woman's rights convention in Seneca Falls, N. Y. in 1848." (Linder) A few years before this convention, Elizabeth Cady St...
In the first paragraph, Kelley explains the ages of these labor-bearing children by saying that “they very in age from six...sixteen in more enlightened states.” The use of “enlightened” is purely sarcastic, and the speaker does not have any respect for those states that allow sixteen year old girls to do heavy-labor. For anyone in the audience that knows the literal definition of “enlightened,” they, too, would be squirming in their seats at the thought of child labor, even at sixteen years of age, being “enlightening.” In her fourth paragraph, she touches more on “enlightened” states by talking about Alabama. She uses “child[ren] under sixteen.. shall not work in a cotton mill at night longer than 8 hours,” and then says that Alabama “does better... than any other southern state,” to again show her sarcasm towards these states...
She shows the jobs young girls do in the factories, “They spin… they weave… They stamp” By showing a list of work the young girls do, Kelley appeals to her audience’s emotional sense in order to deliver message of dissolving child labor. She also uses rhetorical questions followed by solutions in order to question what must be done and how to do it. She states, “what can we do to free our consciousness?... we can enlist the workingmen… to free the children”. By doing this, Kelley forcefully suggests that her audience consciousness are enslaved with the idea of child labor. She states her and her audience must solve the problem with unity to enlist the workingmen on the jobs. This gets back to to Kelley’s purpose of destroying child labor. By offering
The diction used in Fisher’s speech evokes a feeling of being nurtured by a mother; consequently, making her audience furthermore engrossed in her words. She reveals her perseverance towards her kids and the future generation from being sheltered from the disease. Her willpower to heal the children is fueled by the factor of them being at risk, which provokes her to make a pledge emphasizing that she will not give in or rest until they are secure (“American Rhetoric: Mary Fisher”). Her statement causes an effect across America by inducing the feeling of being embraced to all because of her commitment. Most importantly, Fisher’s word use of children throughout her speech compels her to be portrayed as a matriarch to all those in need. Enlighten
Poor, young children being forced to work nearly 24 hours day is a terrible evil that is no longer necessary in the 21st century, thanks to those willing to fight against it. One of those people was lover of freedom Florence Kelley. At the National American Woman Association on July 22, 1905, she gave a speech urging the women to ally with “workingmen”, ln 89, to vote against unfair child labor laws. In her speech, Kelley uses appeals to empathy, sympathy, logic, ethos, repetition, word choice, tone, and current events to defend her case.
Cathy's upbringing did not seem to be a likely place to foster dissent and animosity in the young girl. Her pa...
Not long ago, in the nineteenth century, the words that our forefathers wrote in the Declaration of Independence, “that all men were created equal,” held little value. Human equality was far from a reality. If you were not born a white male, then that phrase did not apply to you. During this period many great leaders and reformers emerged, fighting both for the rights of African Americans and for the rights of women. One of these great leaders was Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Stanton dedicated her entire life to the women’s movement, despite the opposition she received, from both her family and friends. In the course of this paper, I will be taking a critical look at three of Stanton’s most acclaimed speeches “Declaration of Sentiments”, “Solitude of Self”, and “ Home Life”, and develop a claim that the rhetoric in these speeches was an effective tool in advancing the movement as a whole.