Irish Girls in Liverpool (2)

This chapter focuses on the LVA’s efforts to engage with Irish women in Liverpool during the Second World War and post-war years. Despite a reduction in Irish immigration during the war, which saw the LVA’s staff reduced, the organisation was quick to raise concerns about the moral wellbeing of Irish young women once peace was resumed. As such, the LVA continued, throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s, to provoke concerns about the supposed moral vulnerability of Irish young women in Liverpool in a bid to generate support for their patrols.

Female ‘Traffickers’ and Urban Danger

The examination of the LVA’s case load offered here indicates that notions of respectable and disreputable womanhood were subsumed within the LVA’s nebulous discourse around white slavery. Women who were deemed by their patrollers to be a bad influence on others were cast as potential ‘traffickers’. Indeed, setting a supposedly bad moral example to other women was enough to be construed as engaging in a form of trafficking across moral boundaries. Consequently, the LVA’s references to white slavery tell us much more about the organisation’s own moral codes than they do the extent of coerced or forced prostitution in the city.

Experts in Womanhood

This chapter examines the development of some of Liverpool’s most significant moral welfare organisations between the late-Victorian period and the end of the First World War. It unpacks the early historical trajectories of the House of Help, the Liverpool Vigilance Association, the Liverpool Catholic Women’s League and the Liverpool Women Police Patrols, and it argues that these organisations continued to view women’s relationship to the city through the lens of Victorian gender ideals. Moreover, the chapter examines how the pioneering and well-intended efforts of these organisations to craft a ‘respectable’ form of public womanhood during the first two decades of the twentieth century were still steeped in presumptions about the immorality of the working class, and working-class women in particular.

Introduction

The title of this book is taken from a statement made by a Liverpool-based women’s refuge, the House of Help, in 1918. Having offered its services to women for two decades, the House of Help looked towards the end of the First World War with the hope that their organization could be part of the ‘building’ of a ‘new world by helping to save the womanhood of our country’....

Finding Respectable Work for Women in Interwar Liverpool

This chapter considers the ways social purists in interwar Liverpool sought to use traditional forms of employment to control and regulate working-class female morality. Whilst employment could offer women the sort of financial independence and geographic mobility that worried local social purists, organisations like the Liverpool Vigilance Association placed women they deemed to be vulnerable to moral corruption in domestic service, nursing and in mills. Jobs in these sectors were promoted as alternatives to prostitution and they were considered to be more realistic and respectable options for working-class women with ambitions of working in less stable industries, such as the performing arts. As such, the efforts of social purists to find work for women was much less about championing women’s employment and much more about using a limited range of employment options to contain and monitor women branded morally vulnerable.

White Slavery and Social Purists’ Authority

This chapter unpacks social purists’ commitment to the notion of ‘white slavery’ during the inter- and post-war years. Focusing on the work of the Liverpool Vigilance Association (LVA), the chapter argues that this organisation used white slavery to construct their patrolling and moral surveillance of women as necessary to the maintenance of urban social order. By working with only a vague notion of white slavery, the LVA were able to imprecisely apply this term to their case work. Young women from marginalised communities, particularly Irish and working-class women, were presented by the organisation as being vulnerable to white slavery. Despite their records showing little engagement with women involved in forced prostitution, the LVA’s continual allusions to white slavery enabled their patrollers to further their image as experts in the moral protection of women and the organisation’s references to white slavery were used to try to generate donations from LVA supporters.

Regulating Interwar Prostitution

During the interwar years, the state became concerned about an escalation in the extent to which notions of promiscuity and prostitution were overlapping in public discourse. The ‘common prostitute’ had long been used as a cultural and legal reference point against which all standards of female sexual morality were judged. This marginalisation of women who worked as prostitutes was predicated on the prejudicial notion that they were different to other women. Yet, by the 1920s, changes in women’s lifestyles were challenging this form of moral categorisation, and the Street Offences Committee (1927-8) was formed to review the solicitation laws. However, this chapter argues that the creation of the Committee was not a product of concerns about the unfairness of criminalising prostitutes. Instead, the Committee was the product of the Home Office’s concern that a perceived erosion in the notional boundary between promiscuity and prostitution had made solicitation harder to police. Moreover, in paying particular attention to witness statements given to the Committee by members of the Liverpool Women Police Patrols, the chapter shows that even arguments against using the law to control prostitution did not necessarily seek to challenge the idea that the prostitute was morally transgressive.

Patrolling the Port

This chapter examines how the women street patrollers involved in the Liverpool Women Police Patrols and the Liverpool Vigilance Association (LVA) were able to carve out authority for themselves at a time when women’s participation in public life was contentious. The chapter shows that patrollers in these organisations were concerned to make sure that women in Liverpool were not behaving promiscuously, since promiscuity was considered to be an entry point for prostitution. It is argued that, together, the patrol workers of the LVA and the Liverpool Women Police Patrols enacted a moral watchfulness on the city’s streets. These patrollers were motivated by philanthropy and by the desire to show that they, as women, could be useful to society outside of the domestic sphere. But in promoting their own expertise and by intervening in the lives of women who did not always want their help, these patrollers reinforced the notion that some women, particularly working-class and migrant women, were morally vulnerable.

Conclusion

While historians have examined how prostitution and promiscuity were frequently conflated by social purists and philanthropists in the late Victorian period and early twentieth century, this book examines the persistence of these ideas well into the latter half of the twentieth century. The notion that the respectable, young, working-class woman could be distinguished from the supposedly disreputable and corrupting prostitute produced a highly gendered understanding of urban space. Working-class women, and especially immigrant working-class women, were monitored for signs of apparent moral weakness. Moreover, even as social purity organisations went into decline in the post-war years, their ideas persisted in legislative efforts to control prostitution. Women who worked as prostitutes were increasingly regulated and pushed out of sight into less safe working spaces. As such, it is argued here that the law increasingly mirrored the sort of social purity thinking which considered prostitution to be a form of moral contagion which needed to be eradicated.

A Changing of the Guard

This chapter examines the decline of specific female-run, local organizations concerned about what they considered to be the corrosive effects of urban life upon the way young women comported themselves about town. In locating this decline in the 1950s and 60s, the chapter seeks to complicate narratives about the increasing permissiveness of British society during these years. It argues that the post-war decline of social purity groups like the Liverpool Vigilance Association was linked directly to the way in which state-level institutions and local law enforcement had increasingly taken up their cause. In considering the work of the Wolfenden Committee (1954-7), the chapter demonstrates how social purity and moral welfare approaches to prostitution as a form of moral contagion continued to have currency even as the influence of these organisations faded, with concerns about morality playing out in policing and the parameters of the Street Offences Act 1959.