The title of this book is taken from a statement made by a Liverpoolbased women's refuge, the House of Help, in 1918. Having offered its services to women for two decades, the House of Help looked towards the end of the First World War with the hope that their organization could be part of the ‘building’ of a ‘new world by helping to save the womanhood of our country’. Their work providing temporary shelter to women who found themselves lost, stranded or penniless in Liverpool was just one element of local, social purity inspired philanthropic efforts to save young, typically working-class, women from the supposedly corrupting effects of urban life and the temptation to earn money via prostitution. This was a moral war, waged around the docks, the city's main train station at Lime Street, in city centre entertainment districts and in working-class neighbourhoods. Many of the women who stayed at the House of Help had been directed or brought there by women patrollers from the Liverpool Vigilance Association (LVA) and the local Women Police Patrols. Together, the activities of these patrollers and moral welfare workers proliferated a gendered sense of urban space that was predicated upon the idea that some women required moral guidance in order to deter them from the temptations of vice and sexual immorality.

The preventative agenda of Liverpool's social purists and moral welfare workers meant that they intervened in the lives of women according to vague and highly subjective ideas about immorality and vulnerability. As this book will show, these custodians of virtue employed definitions of immorality which disproportionally targeted women who were young, working class and/or Irish. Women in these social groups were subjected to the watchfulness of organizations like the LVA and the House of Help and their movements around Liverpool's streets were sometimes curtailed as a result of these observations. Despite being engaged in a campaign to highlight the skills and competence of women, even Liverpool's Women Police Patrols promoted the idea that women in these groups required moral surveillance. Through their associations with the LVA and the House of Help, the Women Police Patrols gave licence to and profited from the notion that young, working-class and immigrant women required matriarchal supervision from their moral and, in many cases, social superiors.