This chapter examines local social purists’ interwar efforts to maintain social and moral order by channelling young, working-class women into traditional forms of employment and jobs which drew upon women's supposedly intrinsic caring and domestic skills. Many of the women encountered by the LVA were travelling to or from positions in domestic service, jobs as ward-maids in hospitals or factory work. In partnership with organizations like the House of Help, the LVA established links between employers in these sectors and the young women who arrived in the city in need of money and security. Though the need to work had encouraged these women to travel and though employment offered women a greater degree of independence, the LVA nonetheless saw working-class female employment as crucial to the containment and reduction of vice in the city.

This chapter argues that local moral issues impacted on the employment prospects of the women who moved through and around the city in search of jobs. While historians have addressed the broad social changes in working-class women's employment trajectories and there has been much written on the changes in young women's interwar lifestyles, the sheer extent to which moral fears continued to impinge upon both women's employment plans and their very presence in urban spaces throughout these decades has not been explored in detail. By providing this local-level analysis of Liverpudlian social purity approaches to women's work and female morality, I want to show that changes in working-class women's lifestyles were counterbalanced by renewed efforts from organizations like the LVA and the House of Help to promote traditional jobs in domestic service, caring roles and mill work. Lucy Delap argues against the idea that domestic service became ‘redundant’ by the mid-twentieth century. Instead, she suggests that later cleaning and au pair work was genealogically related to earlier twentieth-century domestic service. Understanding social purists’ efforts to promote traditionally feminine, domesticated and caring jobs to working-class women during the interwar years partly explains this genealogical relationship. I argue that women's increasing geographic and occupational mobility paradoxically gave the LVA further justification to morally police women's travels through Liverpool and to reassert gender order through traditional forms of employment.