The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper
Author:
Genres: Biographies & Memoirs, History
Book Type: Hardcover
Author:
Genres: Biographies & Memoirs, History
Book Type: Hardcover
"I write for those women who do not speak, for those who do not have a voice because they were so terrified, because we are taught to respect fear more than ourselves. We've been taught that silence would save us, but it won't."
-Audre Lorde
The entire premise of this exhaustively researched social history is laudable: even in this famous case, typically, as usual, the names of the victims are spoken only in passing, and even then, the attention is almost always squarely focused on the killer, in this case, the nameless murderer known only by his sensationalized moniker, an invention of an enterprising newspaperman looking to sell an image of horror. The five women the killer brutalized, tortured and slaughtered on the streets of Victorian London often appear as little more than footnotes. Discussion of their bleak lives typically take the form of lurid descriptions of their hideous wounds, sometimes placed in the historical context of the squalid and violent surroundings in which they spent their short lives.
This thorough history, in contrast, treats the women as the individuals they were: mothers, daughters, sisters, wives, lovers, friends, and persons with aspirations and lives all their own. This attempt at "re-centering the margins" is long overdue in this particular sub-genre of "true crime." Poignantly, the author writes: "They were worth more to us than the empty human shells we have taken them for... The courses their lives took mirrored that of so many other women of the Victorian age; and yet were so singular in the way they ended. It is for them that I write this book. I do so in the hope that we may now hear their stories clearly and give back to them that which was so brutally taken away with their lives: their dignity." It juxtaposes the splendor of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee celebration, with all its pomp and pageantry, with the lives of ordinary working Londoners and migrants, and the disparity is striking.
It's remarkable that so much evidence exists about the five women described herein. One of the most startling claims made by the book is that, despite their unfortunate circumstances, potentially only one of the victims was actually a prostitute. The general attitude of the day was that all women in such standing at some point were sex workers, but the author does an admirable job in dispelling this generalization. Another important factor to consider is that, if the murderer was not, in fact, targeting prostitutes, who were his intended victims? According to Rubenhold, the killer, far from luring them into dark alleys for sex, instead simply targeted women while they slept. She wisely questions some of the information which has hitherto been taken largely at face value, choosing to eschew many of the salacious newspaper reports about the murders and "witness" accounts who were completely unfamiliar with the women or their activities at all before they were killed.
The portrait illustrated here suggests that, in contrast to the specific targeting of "fallen" unfortunates, classifying the killings as what would today be called "public service" murders, where a killer acts out of the belief that they are helping to "clean up" an area or community, or to root out vice, the victims here were targeted simply because they were women: homeless, indigent, and sleeping "rough" out in the open, with no protection from the elements or from those who wished to do them harm, the murderer simply killed any defenseless woman he happened upon. Rubenhold notes that nearly all of the victims were killed in a reclining position, suggesting that, with the lack of noise or apparent struggle, the victims were simply attacked while they slept. This practice would also be in keeping with several modern-day cases of serial killers who target the homeless. It would also raise the question as to whether any men were similarly attacked; if the police and investigators erroneously believed that the only victims were prostitutes, they may not have connected attacks on male victims, as a cut throat was far from uncommon in the seedy slums of Victorian London.
What the book does do, in exquisite detail, is chronicle the lives of the five individuals murdered in Whitechapel in the summer and fall of 1888. It particularly emphasizes their humanity, describing them as people, albeit those who could not escape their humble birth and station, and whose lives ended tragically, but not as abbreviated as many often assume: none but one of the women were what would be considered young, as all but the last victim were in their forties when they died, several with grown children. The book also provides a detailed portrait of life in late-nineteenth-century London, in the wake of rapid industrialization and social change, which caused great upheaval to traditional modes of life, as people flooded into the great city from near and far, and sometimes abroad. As a result, the city had already reached a population of more than a million, which strained its infrastructure to the breaking point.
The vanished world (much of east London, particularly the Whitechapel district, was obliterated by the blitz during World War II, and was subsequently rebuilt-little of what would have been familiar to the victims thus remains intact today) revealed by the ample descriptions is a bleak one, dominated by crushing poverty, great disparity of wealth, chronic unemployment, addiction and domestic violence. It's a world of soldiers and sailors, itinerant workers, child labor, workhouses, malnutrition, frequent homelessness and vagrancy, which was inescapable for all but the fortunate few.
It's also a world rife with untimely death: life expectancy was typically the mid-forties, for both men and women - men died prematurely from violence, disease and accident, while women frequently died either in childbirth or from complications stemming from an endless cycle of pregnancy and child bearing, in addition to overwork and exposure to insalubrious surroundings that also accounted for an appalling child mortality rate. Rare was the woman who had not lost at least one child, and, in the case of one of the victims, four of her six children to infectious disease.
If you're looking for an account of how the women were murdered, or a description of them after, you'll be disappointed. This book, rightly, considering its purpose, eschews almost any mention of the actual murders or of the killer, in favor of a focus on the individuals who were slaughtered in the streets, probably while they slept. This book is a welcome addition to the often-sensationalized account of this series of events, which humanizes the victims and gives them a voice in a way few thought possible - indeed, none have attempted such a feat previously. The solid and convincing research enhances the moving and poignant descriptions of the lives of both the women and those around them.
------------
"[The lives of the victims] became entangled in a web of assumptions, rumor and unfounded speculation. The spinning of these strands began over 130 years ago and, remarkably, they have been left virtually undisturbed and unchallenged. The fibers that have clung to and defined the shape of Polly, Annie Elisabeth, Kate and Mary Jane's stories are the values of the Victorian world. They are male, authoritarian, and middle class. They were formed at a time when women had no voice, and few rights, and the poor were considered lazy and degenerate; to have been both of these things was one of the worst possible combinations. For over 130 years, we have embraced the dusty parcel we were handed. We have rarely ventured to peer inside it or attempted to remove the thick wrapping that has kept us from knowing these women or their true histories."
-Audre Lorde
The entire premise of this exhaustively researched social history is laudable: even in this famous case, typically, as usual, the names of the victims are spoken only in passing, and even then, the attention is almost always squarely focused on the killer, in this case, the nameless murderer known only by his sensationalized moniker, an invention of an enterprising newspaperman looking to sell an image of horror. The five women the killer brutalized, tortured and slaughtered on the streets of Victorian London often appear as little more than footnotes. Discussion of their bleak lives typically take the form of lurid descriptions of their hideous wounds, sometimes placed in the historical context of the squalid and violent surroundings in which they spent their short lives.
This thorough history, in contrast, treats the women as the individuals they were: mothers, daughters, sisters, wives, lovers, friends, and persons with aspirations and lives all their own. This attempt at "re-centering the margins" is long overdue in this particular sub-genre of "true crime." Poignantly, the author writes: "They were worth more to us than the empty human shells we have taken them for... The courses their lives took mirrored that of so many other women of the Victorian age; and yet were so singular in the way they ended. It is for them that I write this book. I do so in the hope that we may now hear their stories clearly and give back to them that which was so brutally taken away with their lives: their dignity." It juxtaposes the splendor of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee celebration, with all its pomp and pageantry, with the lives of ordinary working Londoners and migrants, and the disparity is striking.
It's remarkable that so much evidence exists about the five women described herein. One of the most startling claims made by the book is that, despite their unfortunate circumstances, potentially only one of the victims was actually a prostitute. The general attitude of the day was that all women in such standing at some point were sex workers, but the author does an admirable job in dispelling this generalization. Another important factor to consider is that, if the murderer was not, in fact, targeting prostitutes, who were his intended victims? According to Rubenhold, the killer, far from luring them into dark alleys for sex, instead simply targeted women while they slept. She wisely questions some of the information which has hitherto been taken largely at face value, choosing to eschew many of the salacious newspaper reports about the murders and "witness" accounts who were completely unfamiliar with the women or their activities at all before they were killed.
The portrait illustrated here suggests that, in contrast to the specific targeting of "fallen" unfortunates, classifying the killings as what would today be called "public service" murders, where a killer acts out of the belief that they are helping to "clean up" an area or community, or to root out vice, the victims here were targeted simply because they were women: homeless, indigent, and sleeping "rough" out in the open, with no protection from the elements or from those who wished to do them harm, the murderer simply killed any defenseless woman he happened upon. Rubenhold notes that nearly all of the victims were killed in a reclining position, suggesting that, with the lack of noise or apparent struggle, the victims were simply attacked while they slept. This practice would also be in keeping with several modern-day cases of serial killers who target the homeless. It would also raise the question as to whether any men were similarly attacked; if the police and investigators erroneously believed that the only victims were prostitutes, they may not have connected attacks on male victims, as a cut throat was far from uncommon in the seedy slums of Victorian London.
What the book does do, in exquisite detail, is chronicle the lives of the five individuals murdered in Whitechapel in the summer and fall of 1888. It particularly emphasizes their humanity, describing them as people, albeit those who could not escape their humble birth and station, and whose lives ended tragically, but not as abbreviated as many often assume: none but one of the women were what would be considered young, as all but the last victim were in their forties when they died, several with grown children. The book also provides a detailed portrait of life in late-nineteenth-century London, in the wake of rapid industrialization and social change, which caused great upheaval to traditional modes of life, as people flooded into the great city from near and far, and sometimes abroad. As a result, the city had already reached a population of more than a million, which strained its infrastructure to the breaking point.
The vanished world (much of east London, particularly the Whitechapel district, was obliterated by the blitz during World War II, and was subsequently rebuilt-little of what would have been familiar to the victims thus remains intact today) revealed by the ample descriptions is a bleak one, dominated by crushing poverty, great disparity of wealth, chronic unemployment, addiction and domestic violence. It's a world of soldiers and sailors, itinerant workers, child labor, workhouses, malnutrition, frequent homelessness and vagrancy, which was inescapable for all but the fortunate few.
It's also a world rife with untimely death: life expectancy was typically the mid-forties, for both men and women - men died prematurely from violence, disease and accident, while women frequently died either in childbirth or from complications stemming from an endless cycle of pregnancy and child bearing, in addition to overwork and exposure to insalubrious surroundings that also accounted for an appalling child mortality rate. Rare was the woman who had not lost at least one child, and, in the case of one of the victims, four of her six children to infectious disease.
If you're looking for an account of how the women were murdered, or a description of them after, you'll be disappointed. This book, rightly, considering its purpose, eschews almost any mention of the actual murders or of the killer, in favor of a focus on the individuals who were slaughtered in the streets, probably while they slept. This book is a welcome addition to the often-sensationalized account of this series of events, which humanizes the victims and gives them a voice in a way few thought possible - indeed, none have attempted such a feat previously. The solid and convincing research enhances the moving and poignant descriptions of the lives of both the women and those around them.
------------
"[The lives of the victims] became entangled in a web of assumptions, rumor and unfounded speculation. The spinning of these strands began over 130 years ago and, remarkably, they have been left virtually undisturbed and unchallenged. The fibers that have clung to and defined the shape of Polly, Annie Elisabeth, Kate and Mary Jane's stories are the values of the Victorian world. They are male, authoritarian, and middle class. They were formed at a time when women had no voice, and few rights, and the poor were considered lazy and degenerate; to have been both of these things was one of the worst possible combinations. For over 130 years, we have embraced the dusty parcel we were handed. We have rarely ventured to peer inside it or attempted to remove the thick wrapping that has kept us from knowing these women or their true histories."
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