Despite the pioneering public roles performed by female philanthropists in Liverpool during the early twentieth century, the increasing confidence with which these women sought to shape public womanhood cannot be explained simply via the tropes of liberation, progress or emancipation. Instead, the story of these moral altruists was moulded in the intersections between class, ethnicity and gender and in the bifurcated distinction between the respectable and the fallen woman. Social purists, street patrollers and religiously motivated philanthropists reinforced the notion that public spaces had a corrosive effect upon working-class women's sense of morality. A number of women's organizations active in early twentieth-century Liverpool paradoxically upheld the belief that working-class women who ventured outside of the moral security of the domestic sphere required both help and surveillance. Their philanthropic activities were refracted through a lens of moral judgement about the seemingly problematic relationships between poor, immigrant and young women and the urban landscape. Social purists and moral welfare workers understood that it was impractical to expect working-class women to remain within the domestic sphere entirely; they understood that many women needed to work outside of the home in order to support their families. Yet such was the level of concern about the ability of working-class women to negotiate non-domesticated lifestyles, their urban excursions were subjected to the persistent moral guidance of watchful philanthropic women who were ready to offer their assistance, regardless of whether it was sought or welcomed by the recipients.

The interest that local social purists, religious philanthropists and street patrollers took in working-class women's presence in public was motivated by a complex mix of benevolence and the assumption that working-class communities were somehow intrinsically inclined towards moral disorder, requiring dedicated efforts to maintain public order and social control. There was also an important political and highly gendered outlook underpinning this work. Moira Martin argues that philanthropic welfare work in the early twentieth century enabled middle-class women to ‘traverse the boundaries of class and gender without any loss of social status’. By subscribing to and emphasizing fears about promiscuity and prostitution amongst working-class, Irish and transient young women, middle-class and upper-working-class women patrollers in Liverpool found fuel for their own efforts to establish themselves as women outside of the domestic sphere.