Rhetorical Analysis Of Kelley's Speech

During the early twentieth century -- and well throughout history -- , women and children were treated more as second class citizens when compared to wealthy, landowning males; the uncongenial treatment of women and children lead to crucial flaws within society: social wounds that consisted of dismal working conditions -- what Kelley, a United States social worker and reformer delivered a speech on at the convention of the National American Woman Suffrage Association in Philadelphia on July 22, 1905 -- and the nonchalant passing by of inequalities. Kelley, like many great social reformers, utilizes the empowering rhetorical strategies within her speech to illustrate the magnitude of the dismal working conditions for children. The rhetorical

strategies utilized -- logos, repetition, and pathos -- assist Kelley in her excursion by motivating her audience to fight against and mend the social wound.
People tend to show a higher frequency of belief in an issue that is reinforced by numbers.

An instance of this trend is the amount of people receiving proper medical care and the rate of mortality within in country -- in countries such as Zimbabwe and South Africa. Kelley exercises the same method -- also known as logos -- mentioned prior in the beginning of her speech to assist her audience in realizing that there is a social wound prevalent within their society and how infected the wound is, “We have, in this country, two million children under the age of sixteen years who are earning their bread. The 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” (Lines 1-7). Likewise to displaying problems in distribution of medical care in underdeveloped countries, Kelley utilizes numbers in order to demonstrate a social wound within society -- the magnitude of dismal working conditions for children. Kelley couples the current use of logos with the repetition of “years” in order to invoke a feeling of empathy from her audience. The utilization of repetition with the demonstration of logos amplifies the response from the audience, further drawing them closer to Kelley’s argument and to the social wound they’ve help inflict on society -- in which instills a sense of obligation to mend the social

wound.
Mother’s, to get their children to listen, often need to repeat themselves in order for the child to listen and perform what needs to be done; drawing an audience to realise that they now have an obligation to fill and bring change within their fractured society. Similarly to a mother commanding her child, Kelley utilizes repetition in order to illustrate the magnitude of dismal working conditions for children and motivate her audience to clash against and mend this social wound prevalent within their fractured society. Kelley utilizes this strategy near the end of her speech, “The children makes our shoes in the shoe factories; they knit our stockings, our knitted underwear in the knitting factories, they spin and weave our cotton underwear in cotton mills” (Lines 66-69). The repetition of “our” motivates the audience to clash against and mend this social wound for the reason that the repetition makes the audience feel as if they had made these children create the clothes on their backs while they do nothing to resolve this issue. This guilt, coupled with the realization of the problem -- using logos -- makes the audience want to mend this social wound that they’ve let become infected.
Kelley ultimates achieves her purpose of illustrating the magnitude of dismal working conditions and the motivation of her listeners in her speech by effectively utilizing logos -- coupled with the repetition of “years” to draw the audience closer to Kelley’s argument -- to assist the audience in recognizing that there is a wound within their fractured society and repetition to appeal to the audience pathos that invokes an guilt and an obligation to mend this social wound.