The Five / Hallie Rubenhold

The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper by Hallie Rubenhold
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

First let me say that this author has done an amazing job of the researching the paths of these five women. Finding records of affordable housing, marriage records, work house stays, etc. Plus giving the reader general background on what life was like for impoverished people of both genders in Victorian London.

Even just a few pages into this book, I started to see parallels between 1888 and 2020. General unrest among populations who were unemployed and teetering on the brink of hopelessness. Governments resorting to police action and oppressive legislation to try to tamp down the turmoil. Drought making it difficult for any economic headway. Temporary gig work, not well paid, was the best many folk could strive for. “Fake news" got everyone riled up, as journalists wrote over the top stories about poverty and prostitution in the East End of London. Assumptions some how morphed into “facts.”

Women were most at risk, as they still are today, no matter whether they earned their money honestly by Victorian standards or not. Although many women earned their few pennies by honest means, society assumed they were prostitutes. Many of them did end up teamed with a man just for protection from the attentions of predatory men all around them, but these were pseudo-relationships, not financial transactions. (This can still happen today among impoverished women. See Barbara Erlich's book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America).

Mary Higgs, a minister's wife who went undercover as a female tramp to study the effects of poverty, was horrified to find that in her ragged dress she was continually verbally assaulted by men. "I had never realised before that a lady's dress, or even that of respectable working-woman, was a protection," she wrote. "The bold, free look of a man at a destitute woman must be felt to be realised."

Poor people were just one disaster from living on the street. An illness that prevented them from working or the death of a spouse could send respectability to the dustbin. Society's judginess was no help. In order to receive help, the poor person often had to accept a heaping helping of humiliation. As if illness or death were a moral failing.

The author makes it clear through her research that it's pretty unclear which women were prostitutes. If you accept a few drinks in a bar and then go home with the person who bought those drinks, does that make you a prostitute? If you choose to live with a partner without marrying them, are you a street walker? But calling these murder victims prostitutes had the dual purpose of making the crimes seem less evil (because they were “only" prostitutes) and adding a sex angle to the story to make it more sensational. In actual fact, the evidence points to the women being killed while laying down, likely while sleeping rough. Far more brutal and much less sexy than the current view of the Ripper.

I'm guilty of being interested in the killers and unaware of the victims of other murderers. Really, the Prime Minister of New Zealand had the right idea when she proclaimed that shooter in the 2019 mosque shooting should be named as little as possible to avoid glorifying the awful act. We've got to stop making heroes out of these criminals and realize that they are merely hateful people, bigots and misogynists.


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