Florence Kelley and Her Social and Political Influence on The Modern World

Florence Kelley was a devoted advocate for labor laws in the United States during the early twentieth century. She successfully fought for the establishment of child labor laws. In a speech made by Kelley on July 22, 1905, she used many rhetorical strategies to show her desire for these laws to be established. The rhetorical strategies she used to effectively convey her message were pathos, logos , and repetition.

The most dominant rhetorical strategy Florence Kelley uses to convey her message of establishing labor laws for children was pathos. She used pathos throughout her speech to connect to the emotions of the people in the audience. Kelley described in detail events such as the process of a young girl going to a cotton mill and working long hours in a dangerous work area. Florence Kelley describes such events to move the audience and strongly appeal to their emotions. Another way Kelley used pathos was by using descriptive language to create an image of the children suffering through their long hours of work. She said things like “under the sweating system, tiny children make artificial flowers,” and “little beasts of burden, robbed of school life that they may work for us.” Kelley used these description to again appeal to the audience’s emotions in the hopes that they would start to understand the harsh conditions that children were working under. She hoped that all the parents and workers would see that they have failed the children and needed to start making a change.

Another rhetorical strategy utilized by Florence Kelley was logos or logic. She used harsh facts to emphasize her message that child labor laws need to be passed. In line thirty-seven of her speech, she said “New Jersey permits it (child labor) all night long,” and in line twenty-five she said “girls from fourteen to twenty years old work all night long.” Kelley included these harsh facts in her speech to make the audience feel that a logical resolution to these children working all night was to pass a child labor law to keep the children safe and healthy. Another example of her using logos is how she describes all the places that do not put restriction on child labor hours such as Georgia. The audience found her argument more reasonable when she used factual information or logic to describe what the children went through in factories or wherever they worked. Because the audience began to see her argument as reasonable and believable, it made them believe that they needed to make a change in the area of child labor.

Starting in the third paragraph, Florence Kelley uses repetition of the phrase “While we sleep…” to convey to the audience that while they were asleep at night, there were children all over the country “working eleven hours a night.” She used the repetition of this to phrase to leave this upsetting thought in the audience’s heads. The effect of these thoughts being etched into the audience’s minds is that they will think about those children before they go to bed at night. They would be reminded of those 2 million children who only had to work because there was no law protecting child labor. Kelley wanted the thought of the children to linger in the audience’s mind so that they will hopefully start to do something to create a better working environment for the children.

Florence Kelley’s speech was very detailed and was effectively delivered. She used many rhetorical skills to make her speech effective and convey her message; such as pathos, logos, and repetition. Kelley provided facts, logical, and emotional appeal to effectively persuade women to help pass child labor laws. It is likely that when women won the right to vote, they voted for child labor laws because of Kelley’s influence on them.