The Industrial Age of the United States was defined by one thing – exploitation. Each day, impoverished laborers, including women and children, desperately flocked to unsafe factories. Once there, factory supervisors worked them tirelessly for hours on end, whether it was sewing tapestries or manufacturing tile for the masses. At the end of the day, these workers were swindled, only paid a few dollars and expected to return the next day with fervor and strength. Social worker and reformer Florence Kelley fought successfully against child labor in these institutions and improved the working conditions for women. In hopes of rallying fellow women and mothers to her cause, Kelley spoke before the National American Woman Suffrage Association on July 22, 1905. Kelley employs unifying diction & first-person language, parallelism, and endearing imagery when convincing her female audience to “free children from toil” (95).
Kelley consistently uses parallelism and repetition to elicit a heartfelt response from her audience of women and mothers. When discussing the growth percentage of different portions of the working class Kelley uses repetition to emphasize the absurdity of the situation, saying “Men increase, women increase, youth increase, boys increase in the ranks of breadwinners…” (10). In repeating the word “increase,” Kelley illustrates the obscenely rapid growth of all wage-earning class sectors and, with each repetition, urges the motherly audience to specifically empathize with and rally for each desperate, disenfranchised group. Moreover, Kelley repeats the key phrase “ while we sleep” throughout three stanzas of her speech. Kelley employs the phrase on lines 18, 29, and 30, often combining its usage with imagery of little girls working tirelessly throughout the night or referencing the long work days of child laborers, pressing how, while the audience sleeps, the children labor all night. The repetition of “while we sleep” persistently imbues the motherly audience with both involvement and guilt, saying ‘while you idly rest, these children suffer,’ simultaneously rallying them to her cause. Summarily, Kelley uses the repetition of phrases and words to encourage empathy and passion from her audience of concerned mothers.
Through the use of unifying diction and first-person language, Kelley warmly allies the audience, imbues them with guilt, and encourages them to rally with her. When discussing the products of child labor, Kelley uses both parallelism and first-person language, saying “they knit our stockings, our knitted underwear…they spin and weave our cotton underwear…children braid straw for our hats…” (66). As Kelley repeats the first-person word “our,” she aligns herself together with the audience, as well as guiltily accrediting them all beneficiaries of child labor. Kelley also refers to her audience as mothers, saying “until the mothers in the great industrial states are enfranchised, we shall none of us be able to free our consciences…” (62). In declaring the entire audience as “mothers” Kelley both unifies the group under one term and stimulates compassion for her cause, since mothers must fret about the welfare of others. She finally urges, “We should enlist the workingmen voters, with us, in this task of freeing children from toil!” (95). Her call to action is succinct, yet powerful because, after establishing her alliance and imbuing them with guilt and an interest in atonement, she simply uses her unifying diction to rally fervor from the impassioned group. Kelley uses first person language and unifying diction in order to create an allied, fervid audience interested in rallying against her cause.
Kelley constructs heartfelt, youthful imagery in order to demonstrate the cruelty of industry and elicit a passionate response from her audience of mothers. Depicting the harshness of child labor, Kelley illustrates “several thousand little girls working in textile mills, all the night through, in the deafening noise of the spindles and the looms spinning…” (18). This imagery describes both the immensity and harshness of child labor, as well as resonates with mothers who can imagine their own little girls subject to such grim work. Kelley employs a similar effect by casting a pitiful image of “a girl of six or seven years, just tall enough to reach the bobbins” (33), which mothers of young girls would bemoan. Finally, Kelley depicts another girl laborer “on her thirteenth birthday, [starting] away from her home at half past five in the afternoon, carrying her pail of midnight luncheon as happier people carry their midday luncheon” (48). Alone, the saddening image of a birthday girl traveling to an industrial factory with a luncheon pail is heart-wrenching, especially to compassionate mothers. However, Kelley also parallels the girl’s luncheon pail (and, therefore, the reality of her job) to a more reasonable situation enjoyed by the middle class, once again exhibiting the inequity and absurdity of child labor. In using imagery, Kelley illustrates the travesties of child labor and provokes mothers to rally with her.
Through parallelism, first-person language & unifying diction, and imagery Kelley masterfully portrays child labor to her audience, rallying them to the aid of her cause. Her rhetorical techniques unite and elicit empathy from her audience of concerned mothers. In other words, Kelley’s rhetorical techniques strengthen her ability to extract emotion and fervor from her audience, achieving her purpose of forming a passionate assembly against child labor.
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