Throughout my four years of Sandwich Secondary School art classes, I have learned, grown, and found my style as an artist.
My work displayed here, called Looking Back for the Future, was actually my final project in my grade twelve art class, created for ACWR’s “Working With The Environment” show. We were instructed to create a piece that was reflective of working/labour and/or an environmental issue, so I combined my love for portraiture with my love of history, and created depictions of Victorian era child labour.
To begin this piece, I researched the topic and chose three different jobs that children were often forced to do in the 1800’s—chimney-sweeping, bird chasing, and sewing textiles in mills. I also researched artists to draw inspiration
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Srdanov.
The goal of this work is to remind viewers of the disgraceful child labour of the past, as well as the unjust labour that is still occurring today, in order to spark the ever-important conversation of change.
As a child, I was always considered artsy. Between doodling, sketching, and making videos, I loved to get my hands dirty and create new things with my friends, all of which really took form in ninth and tenth grade at SSS, where I took my first art classes and created my first real works—my first portrait and my first short film. However cringe-worthy now, I’m thankful, as those experiences really sparked my passion for creating art.
Over the past four years, portraiture has become my favourite type of art, as well as pen and ink, charcoal, and pencil becoming my preferred media. I find something so fascinating and fun about building up a lifelike face, or hand, or body from a 2D sheet of paper; it’s challenging and different every time.
I love to capture my favourite people—musicians, actors, friends, family—and I have also just begun to draw
The speaker of the speech is Florence Kelley. She was a political and social reformer that fought heavily for the fairness of children’s rights in America during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The occasion for writing this piece was the amount of children working in factories during the period to support their families. The intended audience of the speech were America’s leaders since she wanted to give children regulations work hours. The purpose of writing this speech is to get her message across which is that children should have to be work in the factories, that is for older men and women.
The age range of the women workers were from age fifteen to age twenty-four and very few male workers worked in this factory. The reasoning for these women workers to work long, hard hours helped them by “sending brothers to high school, to art school, to dental college, to engineering courses” (p. 96). Most of the work was as simple as “cutting threads, which can be done by an unpracticed girl of fourteen” (p. 44). Despite the harsh conditions of this factory, they only paid their workers six dollars a week and extra money could be made if they worked the whole week. These workers would hunch over hefty and risky sewing machines that only worked by foot pedaling.
July 22nd, 1905 Florence Kelly delivered a speech about the unfairness of child labor at a National American Women Suffrage Association conference. Throughout this speech Kelly uses rhetorical strategies such as repetition, sarcasm, and an appeal to the audiences emotions to express the issue of child labor in America. Kelley uses repetition in this piece to emphasize the importance of her argument about child labor. In paragraph two, talking about the rapid increase in the amount of fourteen to twenty year old women who are working, she says, “ Men increase, women increase, youth increase, boys increase.”
Mary Harris was desperate to get the conditions of child labor publicised, she asked almost every news paper and know one would. “Well, I’ve got stock in these little children and I’ll arrange a little publicity,” is how she responded. She showed no fear to show the whole world how child labor negatively affected children both mentally and physically. When the march finally began it consisted of an “army” of children, and accompanied by a few men and women
Finding the fact that children from the age of “twelve to twenty years” are subject to labor heartbreaking. Florence Kelley’s speech, given at the National American Woman Suffrage Association, uses a variety of rhetorical strategies to turn the hearts of the audience against child labor, along with strengthening the argument for women’s suffrage. She does this to ultimately to argue that when women can vote, they will put a stop to child labor. While other rhetorical strategies, such as logos and ethos, serve mainly to impress the audience’s reason.
In the third paragraph, Kelly describes how on a given night “several thousand little girls will be working in textile mills, all the night through, in the deafening noise of the spindles and the looms.” This auditory imagery is intended to portray the painfully loud noises created by the machinery that young children are forced to work among. Additionally, Kelley depicts “a girl of six or seven years, just tall enough to reach the bobbins,” who may spend the whole night working in a factory. This image emphasizes how incredibly young and small many working girls are, making child labor unsafe and unethical. Florence Kelley’s use of such emotive imagery moves the audience to pity working
At the beginning of the speech, Kelley explains that “two million children under the age of sixteen are earning their [family’s] bread” and serve as a source of income to support households (1-3). Kelley then goes on to disclose that many states have no minimum age requirements for workers which can cause elementary-age children to work in factories and mills at night. Kelley uses the metonymy of bread to refer to money and explains how the child is an important source of income for many families. By elaborating on the ages at which children work, Kelley demonstrates to the audience that anyone can be a victim of the horrors of child labor and attempts to cause the audience to feel empathy toward the children in their situation. Similarly, Kelley employs the oxymoron of “deafening noise” to refer to the poor conditions that children face throughout the night.
Child Labor Analysis Child Labor was one of Florence Kelley’s main topics at a speech she gave in Philadelphia during a convention of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Kelley talks about all the horrors children were going through and the injustices they were suffering. She talks of the conditions children working in, the hours they were going in, and all in all, how wrong child labor was. Her purpose for this was to gain support of people to petition for the end of child labor. Kelley’s appeals to Ethos, Pathos and Logos through the use of great rhetoric is what allows her to achieve her purpose.
In the 1800’s, a girl named Elizabeth Bentley testified before a parliamentary committee investigating conditions among child laborers in Britain’s textile industry. One of the questions stated: “What time did you begin work at the factory?” Elizabeth responded with this: “When I was six years old” (Document 7). This affected her education in years to come. Her health and well-being was affected as well, in which, by the end of her work, she lived in a poorhouse.
Lewis Hine, a photographer at the time had captured children’s working conditions in various industries through photographs. Whether they were in canneries, coalmines, meat packing factories, or in textile mills, children from all over worked in dangerous environments. Viewers of Hine’s photos could easily apprehend the injustices and abuses of child labor. Particularly in The Jungle, Jurgis learns about the workforce and how laborers sacrifice their fingers and nails by working with acid, lose limbs, catch diseases, and toil long hours in cold, cramped conditions. They worked “day after day, week after week” until “there was not an organ of [their] body that did its work without pain” (Sinclair, 1906, par. 4).
Children from as young as the age of 6 began working in factories, the beginning of their exploitation, to meet demands of items and financial need for families. In Florence Kelley’s speech before the National American Woman Suffrage Association in Philadelphia 1905, Kelley addresses the overwhelming problem of child labor in the United States. The imagery, appeal to logic, and the diction Kelley uses in her speech emphasizes the exploitation of children in the child labor crisis in twentieth century America. Kelley’s use of imagery assists her audience in visualizing the inhumanity of the practice.
Another critical grievance against society performed by many affluent employers was the exploitation of the new generations. Not only were fully adult workers being brutalized through an abhorrent working environment, children as young as six years old were exposed to many of the same or similar conditions. Document three is a photograph of two little boys who look to be no older than nine years of age changing the bobbins in a giant machine without any safety equipment while the machine is running. Not only are these kids forced to work in danger of losing digits or other body parts to the hazardous contraptions they worked with all day, this eliminates any chance they have to complete much, if any amount of education that might have helped them rise up in society and break the vicious circle that makes and keeps the poor the way they are, impeding any hierarchical progress. After a grueling day of hard work with little income to show for it, as people went home to their families to eat, they were presented with virtually inedible meat that was then compounded with rat hair, and feces.
About one hundred thousand workers from six hundred different mills were on strike there. The strikers wanted their work cut from sixty to fifty-five hours. About a sixth of the strikers were children under sixteen.” ( 5, Josephson). As a result, she gathered a large group of mill children and their parents, shaming the mill owners of their actions.
Most of the evocative photos taken were in coal mines and dark tunnels, because it best captures the reality of child labor it makes the photo come to life. While the older boys worked as mule drivers, couplers, runners, spragglers and gate tenders, the young boys worked as coal breakers. Their job was to reach down into the coal chutes and pick out any pieces of slate that was not capable of burning. Not only did they get severe scratches from the sharp slate that cut their skin, but they also put their lives at major risk. They could fall into the chutes and get smothered to death if they reached to far down.
Child labor was a great concern in the Industrial revolution but very few people did something to stop it. Women and Children were forced to work more than 10 hours a day with only forty minutes to have lunch. Elizabeth Bentley once said that they didn’t have any time to have breakfast or drink anything during the day. They worked standing up and if they didn’t do their work on time they were strapped (whipped). Children were treating like they were not important, like they didn’t deserve a better life.