Kelley Speach Rhetorical Analysis Enlgish Ap

In the 20th century women and children faced many injustices 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 Notional American Women Suffrage Association in Philadelphia on July 22, 1905 in order to galvanize others to make changes in woman’s rights and child labor laws. Kelley purposefully appeals to emotions of her audience with the use of imagery and utilized parallel thought structure in order to convey her key points more prominently with the aid of literally elements.

Kelley uses emotional appeal in her speech in order to further gain the attention of her audience by manipulating the audience’s emotions to ones Kelley feels will get her point across the best. She starts off her speech by using a piece of data that evokes strong emotion. In the first paragraph Kelley states that “two million” people under the age of sixteen years are working. She then goes further to state the gruesome jobs the children are doing such as working in cotton-mills and coal-breakers. She starts off with this emotional piece of data so that she can immediately get the attention of her audience. Once the attention of her audience is gained she freely talks about her wants for the change in law but she constantly reflects back to emotional appeal by using imagery throughout her speech in order to keep the audience’s attention. Another point she uses it is when she describes the treat of little six or seven year old girls in Georgia. Since 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 working eleven hours a day to create the emotion of sadness to bring the attention of her audience to her. She then immediately says “and they will do so tonight while we sleep” referring to the girls in her scenario to make the audience feel sadder about the situation and bringing the audience’s even attention even more towards her. By getting the Audience sad by using imagery and drawing them into her argument Kelley is able to bring her argument to the audience.

Kelley also uses literary devices in order to make her key points in her argument seem stronger to the audience. Kelley conveys her key points throughout her speech with the use of parallelism. She repeats the same concept of the unfair child labor laws in four paragraphs to emphasize the point of the unfair laws. She uses the similar labor laws in