This chapter examines concerns about the alleged moral frailty of Irish immigrant women in Liverpool between start of the Second World War and the early years of the 1960s. I argue that, although the Second World War presented challenges to the work of the LVA, by the 1950s, the organization had revived its earlier tactics and discourses of moral frailty. The war did offer new working opportunities and status for women. However, as a number of historians of women and the war have already pointed out, assessment of these opportunities must take account of the extent to which women were already working outside the home before the war and the significant wartime moral push-back against perceived increases in women's social freedoms. Penny Summerfield and Corinna Peniston-Bird argue that the ‘Second World War was one of the most contradictory periods in British history for the boundary between male and female roles’. During the early years of war, resistance to women workers was maintained by employers, and it was not until 1941 that single women and childless widows were conscripted into war work out of necessity. Alison Twells argues that women's experiences of work during the war ‘could be both liberating and oppressive’, as their behaviour was scrutinized for signs of impropriety. Concerns about the moral impact of the war were articulated at local and national levels in reference to the belief that war work was moving women into spaces that threatened their respectability. Government reticence about the moral implications of asking women to work in support of the war effort were evident in the state's support for austere, women-only hostels located near armament factories, a policy aimed at reducing the amount of time women workers spent travelling between work and home.

Where Irish women were concerned, the situation was further complicated by the political relationship between Britain and Ireland and by the way Irish women continued to be used by social purists to magnify their fears that young, working-class and immigrant women required moral surveillance. Focusing on the LVA's interest in Irish women during the Second World War and after, this chapter emphasizes lingering continuities in local social purity concerns about this community.