Rhetorical Analysis Of Florence Kelley's Speech

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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. Kelley’s word choice and emotional appeals to is her most powerful tool used in this speech. Her use of the word girl is made powerful by adjectives like “young”, “little”, and one time in line 29, …show more content…

From the first to the ninth paragraph, she uses real laws that have been passed in the time around of the convention. The use of these events make the problem more relevant, than if the laws quotes were in place for a long time before the convention. Her change of tone in the speech gives her words more power. At first the tone is sympathetic, tugging on the heartstrings of the attendees, then she twist the knife with her accusatory tone in lines 66-79, and finally she offers redemption in the last three paragraphs. Finally, Kelley petitions that it's only logical to join forces with “workingmen voters” in the last paragraph, something that most of the women there would oppose. As stated before the audience is a group of feminist, most of which feel oppressed by their lack of right. Why would they invite the agents of evil into their holy sanctum? She qualifies her argument by mentioning enlisting the help of labor unions, that were mostly run by men. She gives them another reason, the entire point of her speech, children need to be free from the chains of maltreatment. The steady strengthening of her voice comes to a crescendo at the end, when the last punctuation is an exclamation

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