Sunday, March 9, 2014

What can we do to solve the puzzling problem of child labor?

Once upon a time, many very young children would have to work long and hard hours in dangerous factories/conditions for little pay and with little safety just to produce goods for everyone else to enjoy. While most kids today are able to enjoy their youth fantasizing about unicorns and pink elephants without worries, many young children then were not even able to enjoy basic things like a good night's sleep. They were forced to work through the day and most of the night in conditions that could have been severely detrimental to their developing minds and bodies. Kelley utilizes powerful rhetoric to persuade the audience of women to become a part of her cause to end child labor through women's suffrage. She strongly uses pathos to evoke empathetic feelings from her audience. To rally support and appeal to the emotions of her audience, Kelley uses much of the following: strong imagery, compelling diction, statistics, repetition and parallel structure. For example, parallelism is used in the last paragraph to state that "they [children] spin, they stamp, they carry" and in the mean time, no one does anything to end it. We know this is wrong, so why don't we do anything? She allows the audience to reevaluate their actions or lack there of; by not doing anything to end child labor, Kelley states that they in fact are contributing to it. She offers a clear solution to this great problem: "enlist[ing] the workingmen voters..to [free] the children from toil" and the "right of petition." Kelley implies that this would not only free the young children from the burden of labor, but it would also "free their consciences" and make them better people overall and in the eyes of Jesus.

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