In early twentieth-century and interwar Liverpool, women's patrol work was used as an important means of morally policing the city's public spaces. Both the LVA and the Women Police Patrols sent women patrollers out onto the streets in a bid to deter misbehaviour and maintain a sense of public order. The women who patrolled Liverpool's streets were afforded informal, though not legal, powers over the actions of young women who were thought to be in need of physical protection and good advice. Authoritative and respectable, the presence of these women patrollers was intended to prevent naive young women from engaging in disreputable sexual practices or venturing into notorious areas. Focusing on the practicalities of patrolling, observing and interacting with women deemed to be morally vulnerable, this chapter considers how social purists and moral welfare workers continued to view urban space as antithetical to respectable femininity even after the First World War was over.

Across the nation, idleness amongst the young, time spent socializing on the streets and the inf luence of glamorous aspects of consumer culture were seen as significant threats to morality. Yet this was more than a straightforward case of social elders fretting about the mores of youth. The questions asked of interwar teenagers and young adults were heavily gendered. Idealized notions of femininity still placed women in sexually passive roles within the domestic sphere. Apprehension about changes in young women's lifestyles, fears about a rise in promiscuity and a perceived rise in amateur prostitution all continued to be underpinned by the presumption that the boundary between the public and private spheres had to be maintained if social order were to be preserved.

Though interwar society considered itself transformed from the comparatively strait-laced ideals of the Victorian era, the gendered notion of public and private spheres was reworked rather than abandoned after the war. The nineteenth-century conceptualization of male and female realms in terms of public and private spheres had positioned respectable women in contradistinction to street women, who were defined as dangerous and transgressive. Moreover, ideal notions of femininity had been defined in direct opposition to the prostitute. In this regard, there was considerable continuity between interwar, cross-class gender ideals and late nineteenthcentury ideas about gender.