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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.

This chapter focus on the informal regulation of prostitution by examining the role of religious voluntary organisations in ‘rescuing fallen women’. Instead of punishing women who were caught soliciting by sending them to prison, the police and magistrates often turned to probation and voluntary organisations in an attempt to rehabilitate these women using a more penal welfare approach. The first half of this chapter will outline the ways in which probation sentences were used to police women who committed prostitution offences and examine the close links that existed between the new probation service and voluntary institutions. The second section will look more closely at the daily activities of these voluntary organisations, focusing particularly on the Magdalene Asylums, the Scottish National Vigilance Association (SNVA) and the Women Patrols. These case studies explore the ideologies, aims and methods of these organisation and how the daily routines and experiences of the ‘inmates ‘changed during the period. These case studies will allow us to examine how the collaborations that were established between these voluntary organisations, the police and the probation service influenced the regulation of prostitution and women’s experiences of the criminal justice system.

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.

This chapter discusses the concept of sexuality as a moral problem in the first decades of the new Irish state. Irish Catholics were involved in social activism directed at issues of public morality. The new independent Irish state had organisations involved in this campaign, which included the Irish Vigilance Association, the Catholic Truth Society of Ireland, St Vincent de Paul Society and the Legion of Mary. These organizations aimed to incorporate the public morality framework into social policy and legislation.

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.