The Children's Era: Rhetoric

    The Children's Era: Rhetoric

      Pathos

      Pathos is a type of rhetoric that uses emotion to appeal to listeners in order to persuade them to agree with the speaker, and it is all over "The Children's Era."

      It's right there in the title. You want to play with people's emotions? Talk to them about the kiddos. Kids are cute, snuggly, and tell hilarious lies about Batman.

      Sanger goes on to do that throughout, connecting the wellbeing of children to the necessity of birth control.

      When we protest against this immeasurable, meaningless waste of motherhood and child-life; when we protest against the ever-mounting cost to the world of asylums, prisons, homes for the feeble-minded and such institutions for the unfit, when we protest against the disorder and chaos and tragedy of modern life, when we point out the biological corruption that is destroying the very heart of American life, we are told that we are making merely an "emotional" appeal. When we point the one immediate practical way toward order and beauty in society, the only way to lay the foundations of a society composed of happy children, happy women and happy men, they call this idea indecent and immoral. (28-29)

      See what she did there? She acknowledged that she's been told she's making an emotional appeal, taking away the power of her opponents to accuse her of it.

      Sanger goes on to say that continuing as we are just doesn't cut it:

      It is not enough to clean up the filth and disorder of our overcrowded cities. It is not enough to stop the evil of Child Labor--even if we could! It is not enough to decrease the rate of infantile mortality. It is not enough to open playgrounds, and build more public schools in which we can standardize the minds of the young. It is not enough, to throw millions upon millions of dollars into charities and philanthropies. Don't deceive ourselves that by so doing so we are making the world "Safe for Children." (30-35)

      Repeated emotional appeals to the safety and security of women, children, and families finally brings Sanger to her most important point.

      We want to free women from enslaved and unwilling motherhood. We are fighting for the emancipation of the mothers of the world, of the children of the world, and the children to be. We want to create a real Century of the Child--to usher in a Children's Era. (104-105)

      A time that's great for kids? Besides graham crackers and apple juice time? Sounds like an emotional appeal to us.