Lo 1

Solomon Lo

Mrs. Hillesland

Block 4 Silver

13 April 2018

The Plight of Child Laborers

People who must “earn their bread” are typically portrayed as desperate people who must

make extreme sacrifices in a desperate struggle to procure food and survive. Thus, when

Florence Kelley, a reformer for child labor laws and working conditions for working women,

describes children who work in factories as people who are “earning their bread,” we know that

she is describing how child laborers are forced to forfeit​ ​their childhood and happiness in order

to simply earn money for their next meal. By using imagery, emotional appeal, and parallel

construction, Florence Kelley elucidates on this plight of child labor in America and implores us

to fight against it.

Kelley immerses her audience into the foul world of child labor, forcing them to

experience the harsh textile factories in the same way as these child laborers who toil inside of

them day after day. By utilizing auditory and visual imagery to place the reader into the same

perspective as the child laborers inside of the factories, Kelley elicits the same feelings of

helplessness and despair in the reader as the factory instills these same emotions inside of the

child laborers. Kelley expounds on how child laborers work “all the night through, in the

deafening noise of the spindles,” where these child laborers are entrapped within “the looms

spinning and weaving cotton and wool,” where they are caught in a helpless situation where they

are victimized for the sake of cheaper manufacturing costs. Kelley’s strategy of “show-not-tell”
 Lo 2

exhibits how child laborers must suffer in textile factories, going into great detail about what

these child-laborers must face on a daily basis. In doing so, Kelley paints a mental picture for the

reader, helping hem empathize with what these child-laborers must endure. She humanizes the

child-laborers and makes them more palatable to her audience. Additionally, Kelley’s emotional

appeal to the audience plays on the empathy of the audience and galvanizes them to help these

child laborers. Kelley highlights how these child laborers have the “pitiful privilege” where “tiny

children” have to work “under the sweating system,” serving as “little beasts of burden,” robbed

of school life that they may work for us. Kelley’s description of the oppression that the child

laborers face serves to engender emotions of pity and outrage from the reader, pushing readings

to listen to Kelley’s argument by hooking in the audience’s emotions. Kelley’s inclusion of

powerful adjectives which describe the child laborers also forces the audience to recognize how

it is their own consumerism and desire for low-cost textiles which creates the situation in which

child labor is used. This creates a personal sense of guilt within the audience, reinforcing

Kelley’s argument that we need to recognize the evilness of child labor and fight against it.

Kelley calls the audience into action to eliminate the victimization of child laborers. At

the end of the passage, Kelley emphasizes how we take action in order to eliminate child labor

“For the sake of the children, for the Republic in which the children will vote after we are dead,

and for the sake of our cause.” This parallel construction hammers in the importance of stopping

child labor in America, providing several reasons as to why the audience should take action and

fight against child labor. By strategically placing this parallel construction at the end of the

passage, Kelley also leaves the reader with a lasting impression of why we need to stop child

labor in America, making the audience more likely to call for change as Kelley wishes them to.
 Lo 3

Kelley then correlates this call to action with the necessity of women’s suffrage, linking the two

causes together to show how they form an overarching case of victimization and oppression.

Kelley states how, “Until the mothers...are enfranchised, we shall none of us be able to free our

consciences from participation in this great evil.” In doing so, Kelley illustrates how systematic

oppression of women during this time has led to oppression of other groups of people during this

time, such as the child laborers. As a result, she connects the plight of the child laborers with the

fact that women didn’t have enough of a voice during that time, causing Kelley to urge women to

seek other methods of causing change to better these child laborers. Despite the fact that women

couldn’t vote, Kelley still urges them to “enlist the workingmen voters, with us, in this task of

freeing the children,” showing how women in particular must personally take a stand against

child labor in order for any change to actually happen.

Kelley conveys how terrible child labor is and charges us to fight against it in her 1905

speech. She uses rhetorical techniques such as imagery, emotional appeal, and parallel

construction to strengthen her argument.