Florence Kelley Rhetorical Analysis
Florence Kelley Timed Write In the times of the Progressive Era (1875-1910), all people – children, women, and men – worked to get more income for their families. Hence the name “progressive,” all people were engaging in business and needed more education for recently developed ideas. Florence Kelly, who was engaged though the hardships of child labor, presented an assertive and powerful speech to the National American Woman Suffrage Association to preach her own thought and knowledge and to convey her message to “free the children from toil!” Her striking, informational, infuriating rhetorical strategies make the convention of women to ignore. Sorrowful and pitiful were words to describe how Florence Kelly felt towards the act of Child Labor in America. Children would be up during the hours of darkness – kitting stockings, stamping buckles, and weaving cotton – “earning their bread” for their families’ income, and Kelly was tired of it. Florence Kelley uses an asyndeton to exemplify the ongoing list of gender and age groups that all of their wages were the same except that the girls’ wage increased more. She says that men, women, youth, and boys “increase” in the race of “breadwinners.” To follow, she adds on another never-ending, interrupted asyndeton saying that girls are in “commerce,” in “offices,” and in “manufacturing.” In the subsequent paragraph, she uses pathos and glum diction to make the convention of women feel sympathy for the little girls working in factories. According to Kelly, “while they sleep,” several thousand girls work “all the night through” in the “deafening” noise of the spindles for goods to sell to the people. Florence Kelley wants the women in the NAWSA convention to be compassionate toward these young, suffering girls. She appeals to these women because moms don’t like to see their children suffer. After all, how would working in a factory all night sound? In her body paragraphs, she invokes informational and logical facts by