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Save the Womanhood! Vice, Urban Immorality and
Social Control in Liverpool, c.1900-1976
Samantha Caslin
Liverpool:
University Press, 2018 Hardcover.
ix + 234 p. ISBN 978-1786941251. £75
Reviewed
by Helen Glew University
of Westminster
Samantha Caslin’s focused study is an
excellent and important intervention in several fields of twentieth-century
British history. Focusing on several voluntary organisations assisting
working-class women arriving in Liverpool – most predominantly the Liverpool
Vigilance Association, connected with the often-notorious National Vigilance
Association – the book traces policies, rhetoric and action around assisting
often young, often single women coming to the city to seek employment and a
fresh start. In so doing, it illuminates much about the continuities in
attitudes to female sexuality, working-class women’s employment, and the
self-appointed role of the middle classes. As a significant port city, Liverpool’s docks and railway stations functioned as the liminal space where women arrived, or through which they passed en route to new destinations either abroad or elsewhere in the UK. As such, the middle-class organisations perceived themselves as instrumental in ensuring that these women did not fall victim to temptation or ‘white slave traffickers’. At its heart, then, the LVA operated around a near contradiction: they were constantly warning apparently innocent and inexperienced young women to stay away from strangers who might wish them harm, all the while relying on their own middle-class self-presentation and the power of the insignia on their badges [52] to get young women to trust them. There was, as Caslin highlights, a particular potentially fine line between the LVA and female ‘traffickers’ as the LVA had to be ‘equally adept at winning the trust of vulnerable young women’ [139]. The LVA and similar organisations saw
the (parental, nuclear) family as the best and safest place for women, as
Caslin’s investigation shows, regardless of the circumstances which had driven
the women towards Liverpool in the first place. Moreover, the book highlights
the extent to which these voluntary organisations were, in many respects,
unwilling or unable to consider how the socio-economic circumstances
working-class women found themselves in might exacerbate their situations. The
ways in which the organisations justified their own existence points also to
their lack of willingness to embrace more radical solutions. Furthermore, as the book traces the
history of policing prostitution (or in some cases perceived or potential
prostitution), the largely static attitudes towards solicitation – and the
gendered and classed assumptions contain within these – come to the fore
throughout. The fact that the former chief of women police in Liverpool in the
late 1920s was unable to declare whether solicitation was a criminal or a moral
issue [74] and was not alone in this encapsulates the difficulties in evolving
a policy to deal with street prostitution. One of the key themes is the long
continuities with the late Victorian period. Caslin details how organisations like
the LVA positioned themselves as bodies distinct from the police and other
state agencies who contributed to their communities. As she documents, the
voluntary bodies had to walk a fine line between arguing that their work was
making a difference and the situation was improving, versus advertising for more funds to continue their crucial work. This is particularly apparent in chapters discussing the Second World War and postwar years where changing
social contexts and attitudes meant that the LVA was less relevant and
struggled for support, but had to continue a narrative of their work being as
needed as ever. Being a book about a single city is a
strength. It allows us to appreciate the fine-grain detail of policy-making and
enactments of that policy. At the same time, Liverpool provides a lens for the
continuity in attitudes to working-class female heterosexuality across the
later nineteenth and early-mid twentieth centuries. It also illuminates
attitudes to Irish female migrants, some of which were in part cultivated by
rhetoric in the Irish press. Indeed, some more discussion of what this
illuminates about national identity and perceptions thereof would have been
welcome. In all, though, this is a very well-written, focused and insightful
analysis.
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