to her father we can recognize a pattern as to why most of these young girls wanted to work in the mills. In Mary's letter, she asks her father's permission to go to Lowell indicating the main reason that prompted her to work in the mill. "I am in need of clothes which I cannot get about here and for that reason I want to go to Lowell." For Mary Paul the mills offered the opportunity to earn her own money, to support herself while at work, and use her earnings to maintain certain independence. These mill workers would return home with new clothes, new ideas, and extravagant spending habits. (Sources 17-18).
             In addition to, the mill's setting offered them an opportunity to socialize with other women. It gave the girls a chance to experience a new world away from the farm:
             "One great advantage which came to these many stranger girls though being brought together, away from their own homes, was that it taught them to go out of themselves, and enter into the lives of others. Home- life, when one always stays at home, is necessarily narrowing. That is one reason why so many women are petty and unthoughtful of any except their own family's interests...To me, it was an incalculable help to find myself among so many working-girls, all of us thrown upon our own resources, but thrown much more upon each others' sympathies..." (A New England Girlhood, Source 13).
             These young women workers were caught between two worlds in transition. The moral superiority underlying concept of women's separate sphere and the forces of industrialization. And to transcend their domestic responsibilities would be to undermine their traits of submissiveness, piety, and purity. Therefore in order to offer a controlled environment, the textile firms took on this chivalrous and paternalistic attitude by providing extensive boardinghouses for their employees. Not only for the single female workers, but also for the married employees. The housing for the female w...