The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper

Content Warning: This section of the guide contains explicit descriptions of sex work, alcohol dependency, sex trafficking, domestic violence, child neglect, and death by suicide.

Historical narratives about women can reflect biases and stereotypes from the time the narratives were written. Hallie Rubenhold argues that the treatment of Jack the Ripper’s “canonical” five victims has echoed and preserved Victorian attitudes toward women and morality. To counter these tendencies, Rubenhold seeks to expose and question the misrepresentation of women in history.

Rubenhold cites the still-widespread and mistaken idea that all five victims were sex workers, when the evidence suggests only Mary Kelly and Elisabeth Stride practiced sex work. The Victorian press even suggested that “the majority of women who inhabited” the lodging houses of Whitechapel were “with very few exceptions […] all sex workers” (22). As Rubenhold repeatedly points out, this assumption was false: Many poor and lower-class women in Whitechapel and elsewhere in the East End performed a variety of odd jobs, often alternating between workhouses, rooms in boarding houses, and living on the streets when they did not have sufficient funds to secure a room.

While the view painting most poor, unhoused women as sex workers was influenced by the Victorian media’s common views of Whitechapel, it was also buttressed by more general Victorian ideas of the “fallen woman” (86). For example, as in the case of Elisabeth Eddowes, 19th-century European society made little distinction between a woman who was single and pregnant and a “prostitute who solicited openly” (167). In fact, simply by being women who lived without a male presence in their lives, these women were seen as immoral and prone to sexual deviance. Such a lack of distinctions reflects the Victorian era’s strict policing of women’s sexuality, which in turn created social stigma and barriers to legal employment that could worsen the situations of women who fell on hard times.

Likewise, alcohol dependency was regarded as “a marker of a person’s degenerate character, ‘intemperate’ nature, poor judgment, moral weakness, and idleness” (123), especially for women. Rubenhold explains how these moralizing views tended to distort or ignore the social and economic circumstances that made alcohol dependency so prevalent among the poor and lower-class, such as the poor quality of London’s drinking water that led to high rates of consumption of alcoholic beverages. As Rubenhold points out in the experiences of Annie Chapman, even those who sought professional medical help did not receive the care they needed, as the emphasis on alcohol dependency as a moral failing led to ineffective treatments and further exacerbated the stigma and shame felt by those experiencing dependency.

Rubenhold thus seeks to complicate the common narratives surrounding the “canonical” five by exposing how common prejudices and assumptions about women, poverty, and alcohol dependency enabled reductive or dismissive narratives about the five women to flourish. In more closely examining the women’s lives and wider context, Rubenhold seeks to offer a more nuanced understanding of the lives of Victorian women.