Child labor and the vote
Florence Kelley's best known speech was delivered in Philadelphia on 22 July 1905, before the National American Woman Suffrage Association, and it argued that American child labor would not be legislated out of existence until the mothers of the children had the vote.
Kelley was not a suffrage organizer by trade. She was a factory inspector and the head of a consumers' organization, and she came to the suffrage convention with what she had: the working hours of children under sixteen, taken from state inspection records, and a proposition about why the laws governing those hours kept failing.
The occasion: a suffrage convention in Philadelphia, July 1905
The occasion was a suffrage convention, and that dictates the shape of the speech. The National American Woman Suffrage Association had existed since the merger of 1890 and was the largest suffrage body in the country, and its delegates in Philadelphia on 22 July 1905 were people who already agreed that women should vote. Kelley therefore did not spend a word arguing for the franchise as a principle. She spent the speech demonstrating a consequence, which is the harder and more useful thing to do in front of an audience that is already converted.
Her standing to do it came from the National Consumers League, which she had led since 1899, and from her earlier appointment as Chief Factory Inspector of Illinois in 1893. She had been inside the mills. The National Women's Trade Union League, founded in 1903, was doing adjacent work from the labor side. What was actually said in Philadelphia was therefore an inspector's report converted into a political argument.
The argument in the order Kelley made it
The argument runs in five moves, and the order is the whole design. It opens, at Philadelphia on 22 July 1905, with the count:
We have, in this country, two million children under the age of sixteen years who are earning their bread.
- Establishes the scale, with that opening count of the American children under sixteen who were earning their own bread.
- Places the audience inside the night, by setting the hours those children work against the hours the listeners are asleep.
- Names the trades and the ages, so that the total stops being a total and becomes a girl of a stated age at a stated machine.
- Turns to the laws, showing that protection varies by state, that some states permit night work by children, and that legislatures have moved backward as well as forward.
- Fixes responsibility, by naming the two groups who could stop it and cannot: the women who buy the goods and have no vote, and the mothers of the children, who have no vote either.
The fifth move is the point of the speech and the reason it belongs among the suffrage documents rather than among the labor ones. Kelley does not ask her audience to pity the children. She tells a room of women that the reform they want is blocked by the disability they are already organized against, and that the two campaigns are one campaign.
How the speech is built, for a rhetorical analysis
The build is worth studying because the devices are few and they are all doing work. Students taking the speech apart for a rhetorical analysis will find the following.
- Repetition of a single frame, the night, which returns through the speech and keeps the listener physically located in the same hours as the children.
- Movement from aggregate to individual, so that a statistic becomes a named age at a named trade and then goes back to being a statistic.
- Contrast between states, which converts an apparently natural condition into a legislative choice that some legislatures have made differently.
- Shift of pronoun, from what they suffer to what we permit, which transfers the subject of the speech from the children to the audience.
- Withheld conclusion, since the demand for the vote arrives at the end rather than the beginning, after the audience has already accepted everything it rests on.
The withheld conclusion is the most instructive of the five. The demand for the vote does not arrive until the audience has already accepted the scale, the hours and the fact that protection depends on which state a child happens to be working in. By the time Kelley names the ballot, it reads as the only remaining step rather than as the speaker's opinion, which is why the speech is set for rhetorical analysis far more often than it is read as a labor document.
What Florence Kelley did apart from making speeches
Kelley's working life was inspection, drafting and enforcement, which is why the speech has the texture it has. The positions below are the ones that gave her the material.
| Position | From | What it involved |
|---|---|---|
| Chief Factory Inspector of Illinois | 1893 | Inspecting workplaces and enforcing the state's factory law, including its limits on the employment of children |
| Head of the National Consumers League | 1899 | Organizing buyers to refuse goods made under conditions the League would not certify, and lobbying state legislatures for hours and child labor statutes |
The consumers league method deserves a sentence because it is the machinery behind the 1905 speech. Rather than appealing to employers, the League published what it found and directed the purchasing power of organized women at the firms that would not meet its standard. It was a boycott run as a certification scheme, and it worked in the absence of a vote, which is precisely the limitation Kelley was complaining about. She led the League from 1899 until her death in 1932.
Why child labor and woman suffrage were one argument
Child labor and woman suffrage were one argument because the people most determined to end the first were excluded from the only instrument that could do it. A state legislature responds to voters. The women who inspected the mills, ran the leagues, drafted the bills and gathered the petitions were not voters, so every statute they won depended on persuading men who could withdraw the favor at the next session. The Declaration of Sentiments had described that condition in 1848, and the ninth of its resolutions demanded that it end. They asked for it in writing in 1848, and it was still unanswered when Florence Kelley stood up in Philadelphia fifty seven years later with a set of inspection figures and an audience of women who could not vote.