We know that, throughout the twentieth century, femininity was culturally codified in problematic terms and that increased social freedom for women came with caveats about the need for women to be demure and to avoid being seen as promiscuous. While Sonya Rose's work reminds us that the idea of female promiscuity as a risk to the nation has a long history of being emphasized at times of national tension and international conflict, this work has sought to add to this by elaborating on the discourses and practices that have given sustenance to these ideas during times of relative peace. Moreover, while important historians of prostitution, such as Laite, Self and notably Walkowitz, have examined the ways that prostitute women have been targeted and marginalized in law, less attention has been given to the historical interplay between the stigmatization and regulation of prostitution and the marginalization of aberrant forms of female heterosexuality more generally. Philippa Levine and Angela Woollacott's work considered this in the context of British society during the First World War, but the wartime ‘them-and-us’ mentality that Levine notes of women police and the women they monitored was part of a wider culture of socially policing respectable femininity that lasted long after the First World War. By considering longer-term fluctuations in the authority of women who monitored other women, this work has suggested that challenges to and the eventual decline of traditional social purity and moral welfare did not put an end to panic about women's wanderings through urban space. At the same time, the amalgamation of social purity ideas into official forms of prostitution regulation was part of what Hinton has identified as a post-war professionalization of welfare work, as well as being a precursor to the neo-liberal, community-based Neighbourhood Watch policing of the 1980s, recently highlighted by Moores.

This book's focus on Liverpool has indicated that some of the most marginalized women, especially the poor and the immigrant, were affected by the way prostitution and promiscuity were conflated and policed as moral problems during much of the twentieth century. Aspects of Liverpool ‘exceptionalism’ are evident in the sheer extent to which local social purists and the local press focused on young Irish immigrant women as potential prostitutes.