Patrolling the Port

Abstract

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.