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Rhetorical Analysis Of Florence Kelley's Tonight While We Sleep

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“Tonight while we sleep…” those little children will be busy working adult like hours, does not that upset you? Due to child labor laws in the United States in the early 20th century, children were working a great quantity of hours during the night time “while we sleep.” In the United States approximately twenty million children are working for their own food because of child labor laws. Florence Kelley, the author of this essay is disgusted by these unjust child labor laws and is empathetic towards the children,but also Kelley is ashamed of the United States rights of women. In this speech, Kelley expresses her loathe feeling towards child labor laws and emphasizes the fact that women cannot vote; in order for them to vote against them. As Kelley begins her speech in paragraphs one through five she lets the audience know of the cruelty in which kids go through at night working miraculous hours. One way Kelley uses rhetorical device in order for her audience to see the unjust laws of child labor she uses repetition which also ties along with pathos. In Kelley’s speech she constantly repeats “while we sleep” in order for her audience to feel empathetic towards the children working at night. She uses pathos so that the parents of children will emotionally appeal towards these kids and see that these hours are not fair for children to be working. Kelley wants the audience to know that kids should be sleeping before adults in a regular life, but clearly because of these unjust laws, kids will not have a regular childhood. Kelley also utilizes logos in order to make obvious, her statement that the child labor laws in the Unites States are unjust. In these opening paragraphs Kelley informs the audience of child labor in the United States for example, “...two million children…earning their bread.” By Kelley saying the following quote, she is trying to say that it is not a small group of kids working, plenty of American children are working. Kelley also says, “They vary in age from six and seven years (in the cotton mills of Georgia) and eight, nine, and ten years (in the coal-breakers of Pennsylvania), to fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen years in more enlightened states.” By Kelley including logical statements

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