A Clearly Modest Proposal (because starvation is eating oneself, right?)

I have to, at some point or another, use the following words/phrases in this post:
-Once upon a time
-Everyone

-Today

-Rhetoric

-Pink Elephants
-Jesus

I also have to use a semicolon and a colon somewhere.

Also, I feel kind of guilty about the whole "kids making pink elephants" thing, so I decided not to use pink elephants that way. But the other way I could think of in terms of using it is, well, rather snarky. So heads up.

Once upon a time, everyone had to work to stay alive. I mean everyone, kids included (or so Florence Kelley would have us believe). Kelley portrayed the children of the time as hapless zombies forever doomed to work in order to stay alive. And she promised that she could fix it; if women were given the right to vote, child labor would end forever (and then presumably everyone in the world would gather in a meadow full of rainbows, hold hands, and watch Jesus fly around on a fluffy pink elephant). But reality simply isn't that generous: even if women had the right to vote, children would continue working long hours at night. We know this is true because of how our world is today.

First off, I dislike Kelley's entire premise of stopping child labor to begin with. Her logic goes something like this: children are working late at night in order to stay alive. This is horrible and shouldn't happen. Therefore we should create a law that forcibly prevents children from working. Personally, I take offense to that. While I have no problem with the first two points of that piece of logic, the truth is that she talks about the children being "breadwinners." Breadwinners, by default, make sure that everyone has access to the food they need to survive. And so if you deny the child breadwinners the ability to win bread, then they will have no choice but to starve. Either that, or they will work at night by illegal means and thus will be subject to even fewer regulations and rights than they already are. This is no better by any stretch of the imagination. So Kelley's "solution" will cause more problems than it solves. What kind of person comes up with an idea like that? Oh yeah, Florence Kelley.

Besides this, Kelley also claims that giving women suffrage is going to stop this problem. This is not that case. If the mothers of children who work late at night to feed everyone respect that they need the money from the child labor, they will certainly not decide to outlaw it. Think of it this way. A child works late at night to earn her food. She is then banned from doing so. Therefore, the family of the child must now work far harder to make enough money for both themselves and the child. It is simply illogical for women, even empowered women, to ban child labor at night. Besides, even in today's world children are working late at night. Want an example? Look at the time stamp on this blog post (it's currently 10 o'clock, but the blogger server is in a different time zone). Then consider that I still have homework from two other classes to work on. And I'm not alone. In fact, I have it better than most of my friends. Children are still working late at night. As a matter of fact, women now have the right to vote. There seems to be something contradictory about those facts and Kelley's claim.

Ultimately, I respect that Kelley can effectively write rhetoric. She can tug the heartstrings of her audience. But her words are ultimately a pile of useless sentiments, disproven by the harshness of reality. Be it the world of today or the world of Kelley's time, Kelley's claims were doomed to failure from the very beginning.