Immoral Traffic: Mobility, Health, Labor, and the “Lorry Girl” in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain

The story of the lorry girl and the lorry driver, the roads they traveled on, and the responses toward them allows for some telling insights into a strange kind of “immoral traffic” in 1930s and 1950s Britain. Whether seeking employment or adventure, leaving the “distressed areas” or absconding from an approved school, the lorry girl was linked to anxieties about women's mobility, unemployment, venereal disease, and delinquency. At the same time, the figure of the lorry driver, both romanticized and marginalized, showed that deviant and commercialized sexuality could be linked to the economic and social inequality of both men and women. Concerns about lorry jumping and hitchhiking in this period also reveal a different kind of narrative in the development of British roadways, which not only were tied to both the health and efficiency of the nation but also were spaces of sexual danger and sites of social delinquency.

Women Policing Women: A Patrol Woman in Montreal in the 1910s

The policewoman movement in England, Canada, and the United States begun in the 19th century with the prison reform movement. Just as separate prisons for women would protect them from the sexual danger of incarceration so would police matrons save the detained woman from the threat posed by male criminals and station officials. The next step in the evolution of the movement in the 1910s propelled women onto the streets as safety workers, patrol women, and policewomen, ostensibly to protect young women from lecherous males and to prevent the moral downfall of working-class women. The first generation of policewomen were a combination of social workers and cops, their duties being to chaperon the city's young women at dance halls, in parks and on urban streets. In 1918, Montreal hired its first policewomen to investigate women criminals. Using the files of one of the protective officers (Elizabeth Wand), Myers analyses the impact of this new disciplinary force. As a pioneer policewoman, whose job it was to patrol women and keep them safe from sexual danger and immorality, Wand expanded the meanings of crime, policing, and discipline. For this she encountered resistance from male officers and judges and from the policed women as well.