Page 22 - SpringBoard_CloseReading_Workshop_Grade8_Flipbook

Third Reading: Text-Dependent Questioning
Now read the passage again, this time with the focus of reading to respond to the Key Ideas and Details interpretive questions. Write your responses to each question and highlight or underline the textual evidence that supports your answer. During class discussion, you may also want to annotate the text to record a new or different meaning of the text.
Background information: Florence Kelley (1859–1932) was an American social worker and reformer. She fought successfully for laws that would restrict the practice of child labor so that factories could not employ young children as workers. She delivered the following speech before the convention of the National American Woman Suffrage Association in Philadelphia on July 22, 1905. This association fought to allow women the right to vote in elections, which they did not have in the U.S. until 1920.
Speech
to the National American Woman Suffrage Association
Philadelphia, July 22, 1905 by Florence Kelley
1 We have, in this country, two million children under the age of sixteen years who are earning their bread. They 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.
2 Tonightwhilewesleep,severalthousandlittlegirlswillbeworkingintextilemills,all the night through, in the deafening noise of the spindles and the looms spinning and weaving cotton and wool, silks and ribbons for us to buy.
3 In Alabama the law provides that a child under sixteen years of age shall not work in a cotton mill at night longer than eight hours, and Alabama does better in this respect than any other southern state. North and South Carolina and Georgia place no restriction upon the work of children at night; and while we sleep little white girls will be working tonight in the mills in those states, working eleven hours at night.
4 In Georgia there is no restriction whatever! A girl of six or seven years, just tall enough to reach the bobbins, may work eleven hours by day or by night. And they will do so tonight, while we sleep.
5 Nor is it only in the South that these things occur. Alabama does better than New Jersey. For Alabama limits the children’s work at night to eight hours, while New Jersey permits it all night long. Last year New Jersey took a long backward step. A good law was repealed which had required women and [children] to stop work at six in the evening and at noon on Friday. Now, therefore, in New Jersey, boys and girls, after their 14th birthday, enjoy the pitiful privilege of working all night long.
aCademiC VoCabulaRy
suffrage: movement to enfranchise women
key ideas and deTails
Why do you think Kelley includes details and facts about child labor from so many different states in her argument?
key ideas and deTails
What emotional impact (pathos) on the audience do you think Kelley intends by repeating the phrase “while we sleep”?
key ideas and deTails
What factual information does Kelley use to inform her audience about child labor, appealing to their sense of logic or reason (logos)?
Close Reading Workshop 2 • Close Reading of Argumentative Nonfiction Texts 21
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