This is a very important book. It changes the lens of history and turns a story we all know well into one we have never heard.
The Five
Hallie Rubenhold’s meticulously researched tome tells the stories of the lives of the five canonical victims. Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly. For women the history books have always been referred to as ‘just prostitutes’ I feel it is important to write their names. To say their names. To recognize they were human beings who spent their last moments on earth in fear and dread.
The five women all lived very different lives but there are common themes. They were, more often than not, alcoholics. Driven to drink by their dire circumstances. Almost all had married and had, and had lost, children. Almost all had experienced the breakdown of their marriages: Which in Victorian England was not a happy place for women. It drove them to the workhouse or the streets. Often choosing the streets as the better option.
They were not all prostitutes
They were not all prostitutes. Some did sell their bodies but most were poor, fallen women who society had decided were no good once their husbands had discarded them or the drink had taken them.
The issue at the heart of this book is the way women were perceived in Victorian times. It was as much to do with class as it was with their sex. After all, a woman was sitting on the throne. But Queen Victoria was virtuous and good and royal. The women killed by Jack the Ripper were anything but. Rubenhold references a letter written by an upper class ‘gentleman’ stating that the Ripper had done London a favour by ridding it of some of the residents bringing who lower the tone. This letter reminded be of a fictional Victorian gentleman who, in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol referred to the poor dying as a good thing as it would ‘decrease the surplus population’. Being compared to Scrooge is, generally speaking, not something to be proud of.
Blatant sexism
The blatant sexism of the day still exists. People crowd into museums and watch gruesome films of Jack the Ripper with him as the star of the show he wrote. People desperately try to solve the great mystery of who did it. Which is deemed to be ok as the victims were ‘just prostitutes’. Women who sell their bodies have, for many years, been seen as below society. Not deserving of a place within the walls of normal morals and ethics. This was seen again in the 1970s when the Yorkshire Ripper was terrifying the north. Again, the victims were ‘just prostitutes’. The police repeatedly referred to the Ripper as ‘hating prostitutes’. Much more likely that he just hated women. The same going for Jack and the other serial killers who followed women of the night to their doom. The tone of public opinion changed when Peter Sutcliffe murdered Jayne MacDonald, a young girl of 16, a school leaver working in a shop, who was definitely not a prostitute.
Lessons to learn
So what can we learn from this book and how should we reflect? The clear winner here is that we need to stop categorising women into good and bad based on their sexual behaviour. We all do it, or have done it, but is it really acceptable to dismiss these women because they were forced to sell her body? Most of the women in Victorian London who walked the streets were there because they had no other way to make money. A woman’s work was so low paid she could not support herself without a man. And even those with men struggled in ways we struggle to understand today.
Society created the necessity for prostitution, then punished the women who took part in it. Then easily dismissed them when they are murdered in the streets. Women have been forced to sell their bodies to men for centuries: The oldest profession, as it is known. But the job rose from supply and demand. If men were not willing to pay for it, women would not do it. The poverty stricken, homeless, starving women who fell victim to Jack the Ripper; some sold themselves to men to put a roof over their head and food in their bellies. They were desperate, with the only alternative way of earning income being the workhouse. Women could work of course, but the income they could earn wasn’t enough to support them or their children. The wage gap in Victorian England was significant.
People grieved for them
Reading this book should make you sad and angry. I shed more than one tear over the tragic lives of these women. They were loved, they loved others. They had children, parents, lovers and friends. The streets were lined for more than one of their funerals. People grieved for them.
So next time you think about Jack the Ripper, or any other woman-killer, think about this. We idolise a man who brutally murdered at least five women. We do this because he is unknown, a mystery to be solved. But if we place a murderer on a pedestal and make him the star of the story, what are we saying about ourselves and our society? Have we not moved on in the last 140 years? Why do we still find ourselves drawn to men like Jack the Ripper? Why do we not remember the names of his victims?
Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly.
Charlotte Wood is a feminist and writer of the macabre and sinister. She reads horror, fantasy, classic literature and historical fiction (with a preference for history from a woman’s perspective).