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A Rhetorical Analysis Of Florence Kelley's Speech

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AMSTUD Essay During the Progressive era of the United States, Florence Kelley, a social reformer of the time, delivered a speech to the National American Woman Suffrage Association advocating the need to change the working conditions for the children of America. With multiple uses of hortative sentences, anaphora, parallelism, and diction that is meant to make the reader feel that they are part of the problem, Florence Kelley effectively appeals to the audience's pathos and emotion in this speech to call her listeners to action and to join the bandwagon against the issues addressed. Though women of the time couldn’t vote, Kelley purposefully used the diction “we” and “our” to explain to the audience that it was still there problem. Though, politically, they had no power, Kelley asks the audience the question “what can we do,” to emphasize that regardless of voting, they still must find a way to take action. By pairing parallelism with competitive and critical diction, Kelley effectively pits different states against each other, such as when she claims that “Alabama does better in this respect than any other southern state.” This is …show more content…
By using the phrase, ‘while we sleep,” and continuing it with the horrors of children labor, Kelley means to open the audiences eyes to there own ignorance. This realization, added with saddening comments such as, “little white girls will be working eleven hours at night,” and “The children make our shoes… our stocking… our underwear,” is used to force the audience into caring. By speaking for the audience when Florence Kelley says, “we do not wish this,” and in the final paragraph where Kelley says, “for the sake of the children, for the Republic…” this is used to invoke a patriotic response from her listeners. Lastly by giving her listeners a common “task of freeing the children from toil,” concludes Kelley’s effective call to

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