Sarah Bastian
11/26/12
Child Labor Essay
Florence Kelly, in her speech at the National American Woman Suffrage Association's convention in 1905, uses powerful emotion and rhetorical skill to compel her audience to action. On the issue of children’s labor, Kelly employs such methods as urgent tone, repetition, polysyndeton, and asyndeton to effectively convey her views.
After beginning with the fact that two million children are currently earning their own food, a truly staggering number, Kelly informs her audience that the number of girls who do this is increasing at an alarming rate. Not only does she use this introduction to connect with her audience, who naturally cares about women, but she also establishes a clear and immediate need for change. By observing that “tonight while we sleep, several thousand little girls will be working in textile mills,” Kelly involves her listeners in the issue and alerts them to the very present nature of it. The problem, child labor, is growing, and something must be done to stop it now.
Indeed, Kelly repeats the word “tonight” all throughout her speech, constantly making it an urgent issue. By saying, “while we sleep little white girls will be working tonight in the mills,” Kelly challenges her audience to think about their own situations, their own comforts, and compare their own needs. After the shocking fact, “A girl of six or seven years, just tall enough to reach the bobbins, may work eleven hours by day or by night,” Kelly follows it up once again with the stark statement, “they will do so tonight, while we sleep.” As she moves to a direct appeal for action, Kelly states, “No one in this room tonight can feel free from such participation,” once again tying together the children for whom she advocates and the people to whom she pleads.
Another rhetorical device Kelly uses effectively is polysyndeton. She describes the work of young girls in textile mills as “all the night through,in the deafening noise of the spindles and the looms spinning and weaving cotton and wool, silks and ribbons for us to buy.” The overwhelming nature of such a sentence underscores the noisy, oppressive environment Kelly seeks to describe.
Kelly also uses the opposite, asyndeton, to bring home the incredible volume of child labor. She lists the staggering amount of products children participate in making, saying, “The children make our shoes in the shoe factories; they knit our stockings, our knitted underwear in the knitting factories. They spin and weave our cotton underwear in the cotton mills. Children braid straw for our hats, they spin and weave the silk and velvet wherewith we trim our hats. They stamp buckles and metal ornaments of all kinds, as well as pins and hat-pins.” Removing conjunctions from such a list only adds to the shock of its incredible length.
Through her speech, Florence Kelly reaches her audience effectively by first establishing an urgent cause, then following it up with well-researched and very applicable examples. She is clear in her goal of eradicating child labor, and leaves her listeners in no doubt that this issues effects all of them personally.