In the 20th century, women and children faced many unjust actions across the United States. Many supporters of the women’s suffrage were also advocates of child labor restrictions. Florence Kelley, an ambitious reformer and social worker, delivered a speech to the National American Women Suffrage Association in Philadelphia on July 22, 1905 to encourage others to advocate the rights of women and children. Kelley appeals to the pathos of her audience with the use of imagery thought structure in order to convey her key points more clearly.
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Kelley gains the attention of her audience by sharing her feelings with the audience to project her point. In the first paragraph Kelley states that “two million children under the age of sixteen years” are working. She then goes further to state the gruesome jobs young children are forced to complete, such as: working in cotton-mills, coal-breakers, and shoe factories. These jobs appeal to the audience in an emotional state, in order to receive the audience’s attention.
Once the attention of her audience is gained she freely talks about her wants for the change in women’s rights and child labor laws, but she constantly reflects back to emotional appeal by using imagery throughout her speech to keep the audience’s attention. Another point is when she describes the treat of little six or seven year old girls in Georgia. At this point in time Georgia had no child labor laws. Kelley uses the possible scenario of a little six or seven year old girl in Georgia whom is just able to reach the bobbins, A cylinder or cone holding thread, yarn, or wire, working eleven hours a day to create the sense of saddened pathos.
Descriptive language is used to help the audience imagine helpless children working “eleven hours by day or by night. ” The purpose of using pathos in this speech was feeling that the children everywhere had been failed and cheated out of their childhoods. They could vividly see, “the children [making] our shoes in the shoe factory, [knitting] our stockings, our knitted underwear in the knitting factories. ” Kelley fills her speech with emotion. Beginning in the third paragraph, Kelley uses the phrase that she continues to repeat through much of the speech.
She repeats, “while we sleep.. ” to show her audience that they had the luxury of sleeping while children all over America were “working eleven hours a night. ” The purpose of using the repetition was to leave those powerful thoughts in the audience’s head. That way, when the members of the convention laid their heads down to sleep, they would be reminded of those two million children who had to work throughout the night, all because there weren’t any laws protecting children. Hopefully this will cause a roar in the Association urging them to fight for what is right.
