An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and through Knowledge Unlatched.Save the Womanhood is a fascinating new history about promiscuity, prostitution and the efforts of local social purists to ‘save’ working-class women from themselves. The book examines how the work of the Liverpool Vigilance Association was supplemented by others, such as the Women Police Patrols, the Liverpool House of Help and the local branch of the Catholic Women’s League. It argues that though these organizations helped many lost and stranded women, their work also enacted a form of moral surveillance on the streets. As such, the book uncovers how important twentieth-century anxieties about changing sexual practices, female immigration, white slavery and the rise of new consumer cultures played out at local level and with what consequences for women in Liverpool. The book also brings together a wide range of local and national sources to show that when female-run, local organizations concerned about immorality went into decline in the post-war years, it was because official institutions and local law enforcement had increasingly taken up their cause. Consequently, Save the Womanhood argues that young, working-class women who travelled through Liverpool in search of work and adventure continued to arouse moral anxiety even as the city’s social purists battled to maintain their influence.
Samantha Caslin is a Lecturer in History at the University of Liverpool.
Introduction(1) Experts in Womanhood: Morality and social order before and during the First World War The House of Help The Liverpool Vigilance Association The Catholic Women’s League Women Police Patrols Re-establishing Gender Boundaries during the War (2) Patrolling the Port: Interwar moral surveillance Urban Danger Managing the Streets Watching the Runaways Return to Domesticity (3) Regulating Interwar Prostitution: National debates and local issues Prostitution in Liverpool The Street Offences Committee Women Police Patrols and Moral Control (4) Finding Respectable Work for Women in Interwar Liverpool Women and the Local Economy Fears about Prostitution Employment Guidance Managing Young Women’s Ambitions (5) White Slavery and Social Purists’ Authority Charity and Class Internationalism and Expertise The Death of White Slavery? (6) Female ‘Traffickers’ and Urban Danger Mary McAuley’s Mill Street Social Purity and the Female Trafficker (7) Irish Girls in Liverpool (1): Interwar Moral Concerns Irish Immigration and Social Status Interwar Networks of Moral Surveillance (8) Irish Girls in Liverpool (2): World War Two and the Post-War Years Travel, Morality and the War The Irish Girl and Wartime City Life Peacetime and Irish Immigration The Irish Girl in the Affluent Society (9) A Changing of the Guard: Moral order, gender and urban space in the post-war years Policy and Purity in the 1950sMorally Policing 1960s LiverpoolThe End of the LVAConclusion
Reviews'A fascinating book with rich, insightful material.' Dr Charlotte Wildman, University of Manchester
