Once upon a time, Children were forced to work in deplorable conditions, while everyone else fell "asleep", unaware of this injustice. Children still could be working today, if not for the efforts of Florence Kelley to reform the lax labor laws from the Gilded Age. Kelley utilized a strong rhetoric and logos to convince her audience that granting women suffrage was the only way to end the injustice. Florence Kelley depicts the children that are forced to work as Jesus-like figures: pure and innocent. Kelley illustrates the pain that little, innocent boys and girls ",just tall enough to reach the bobbins," had to endure and contrasts this with the evil "deafening " mills that they have to work in. Additionally, Kelley's strong diction reveals the disgusting evil of child labor. The oxymoron "Pitiful Privilege" to point out that the children are the last ones to benefit as they are robbed of their childhood; the free spirit telling them to dream of pink elephants and cotton candy is lost as children become "breadwinners." War diction such as "enlist," "freeing," and "toil" effectively characterize the movement to free children as a crusade and implores the National American Woman Suffrage Association in Philadelphia to enfranchise the mothers of these poor children in order to free them.
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