Florence Kelley Rhetorical Analysis

AP Rhetorical Essay - Florence Kelley
“Tonight while we sleep, several thousand little girls will be working in textile mills, all night through, in the deafening noise of spindles and the looms spinning and weaving cotton and wool, silks and ribbons for us to buy”. These words, spoken by Florence Kelley, were used to describe how horrible and tiring child labor was for young children in her era. When she was young, Florence’s father took her to visit factories where child labor occurred and this inagurated her passion to speak out against such. The use of diction, repetition, parallelism, and loaded words in her speech helped explain the importance of the issues she was addressing and the issues she successfully improved in the long run. Florence Kelley set up her speech in ways that would keep her audience intrigued by what she was saying. The first line of her speech gives the audience the main point right away. She started off by stating a very interesting statistic, “We have, in this country, two million children under the age of sixteen years who are earning their bread” From this first line it can be implied that her speech will deal with children working underage or in other words, child labor, and she also supports her argument by using logos and statistics. Right away these statistics show that Kelley has done research on her topic and shows just how passionate she is about child labor, and because two million is such a colossal number, it heightens the audience's emotions. The thought of such a high number of children working and performing dangerous tasks would certainly make the audience empathetic and ultimately persuade them to agree with Kelly's opinion. Also, she uses repetitions when she says, “While we sleep…”, repeatedly throughout her speech. When she says this she is appealing to the audiences emotions. She is trying to make the audience feel guilty for resting and relaxing while children all over the world are working for hours into