Women in the Northeast were almost always expected to conform to rigid social norms and gender roles. Early marriage and child rearing were the only acceptable paths a woman could travel. The "mill girls" of Lowell, Massachusetts experienced a far different upbringing than their counterparts in the South or in the Northeast. Sent to factories at a young age, these girls experienced a level of independence that more resembled life for slave women than for other women in the Northeast; the pious middle-class women worked hard on domestic chores and child rearing but their work was viewed more as social obligation and gender role fulfillment than as official employment. For the "mill girls," employment became a new way of life for young American females. Working and living conditions were grim for "mill girls." Room and board were provided and combined with their low wages, their living conditions resembled that of slaves. Sisterhood readily emerged out of the close quarters "mill girls" found themselves in. Bunking with other young females, "mill girls" created social bonds that helped them cope with the hard labor they faced, even though all the girls maintained high ideals for being able to transfer their wages to their families at home. Like other Northeastern females, though, the "mill girls" were mainly expected to get married. Their factory work was not an exercise in self-improvement but only a step along a traditional life course that...

For slave women, sisterhood bonds enabled some social stability amid chaotic conditions. Sisterhood substituted for a lack of connection to family or community due to the slave trade tearing apart families, and ripping mothers from their children, parents, siblings, and other members of their extended family. When slave women bonded they usually did so to provide emotional support in the midst of oppression. At the same time, though, slavery created situations that forced women to turn on each other out of a need for self-survival.
For women in the Northeast raised in pious Protestant environments, sisterhood often entailed bonding on religious and moral grounds. A means to exert political pressure before suffrage, women's grassroots movements promoted women as public figures decades before they were able to vote or run for office. Although sisterhood did not thwart patriarchy entirely, the bonds between pious women at least offered a counterpoint for male dominance. Finally, sisterhood among the "mill girls" in Lowell, Massachusetts arose out of the peculiar living and working conditions of the factories. The bonds held "mill girls" together but only as far as their term of labor lasted; once their work was accomplished the "mill girls" would return home to the rigid gender roles ascribed to them.