Rhetorical Analysis of Florence Kelley

In her speech to her audience of mothers, Florence Kelley challenges the current situation of child labor laws, emphasizing on the differences of their life and grown adult's, and connect to the audience of the experiences they face, in order to amplify her audience's long standing feelings of injustice, and to convey a solution to stop current political events.

Kelley enriches her audience's current feelings of the current unfairness of societal norms placed upon them. She consistently references the juxtaposition of young children working through the night as their parents sleep soundly in their house. She contrasts the two experiences allowing her to convey the corrupt situation of child labor laws. The emotional aspect of her descriptions/depictions of the grueling nights the children work in, appeals to the audience's sense of injustice. Kelley wants the audience to realize the cruel truth of the exploitation of young children in order to push them to look for a solution that she later presents.