Finding Respectable Work for Women in Interwar Liverpool

Abstract

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.