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

by Hallie Rubenhold

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.

Jack the Ripper killed prostitutes, or so it has always been believed, but there is no hard evidence to suggest that three of his five victims were prostitutes at all.

However, the police were so committed to their theories about the killer’s choice of victims that they failed to conclude the obvious—the Ripper targeted women while they slept.

Within laboring communities, the social stigma of time spent at the workhouse was so great that many would rather beg, sleep rough, or become a prostitute than place themselves at the mercy of this institution.

While a man could divorce his wife for a sexual liaison outside the marital bed, a woman had to prove her husband was guilty of adultery in addition to another crime, such as incest, rape, or cruelty.

had never realised before that a lady’s dress, or even that of a 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.” When staying at a casual ward she learned that the lecherous male porter had a key to her dormitory. When she complained about this, she was told that at another workhouse “the portress left the care of the female tramps to a man almost entirely,” and it was accepted that “he did what he liked with them.”

At times the coroner’s inquest became a moral investigation of Polly Nichols herself, as if the hearing was held in part to determine whether her behavior warranted her fate.

Annie needn’t have suffered. At every turn there had been a hand reaching to pull her from the abyss, but the counter-tug of addiction was more forceful, and the grip of shame just as strong. It was this that pulled her under, that had extinguished her hope and then her life many years earlier. What her murderer claimed on that night was simply all that remained of what drink had left behind.

we’re all up to no good and no one cares what becomes of us. Perhaps some of us will be killed next! If anybody had helped the likes of us years ago we would have never come to this!”

She was anonymous: a woman with a mutable story, a changeable history, someone who had recognized that the world didn’t care about her, and chose to use that as a weapon in order to survive.

Over the course of her life, Elisabeth had been a variety of things to many people; she had been both dark and light, a menace and a comfort. She had been a daughter, a wife, a sister, a mistress, a fraudster, a cleaner, a coffeehouse owner, a servant, a foreigner, and a woman who had at various times sold sex. However, the police and newspapers saw only another victim: an “unfortunate” who resided in a Whitechapel lodging house, a drunk, degenerate, broken-down woman far beyond the blush of youth. They depicted her passing as sad and unnecessary, but no great loss. These impressions, when set in typeface, would become fixed and for the most part unchallenged. There were no dissenting voices to object to this portrait and no attempt was made to paint a fuller one. No one cared to find her Swedish family and tell their story. No journalist sought out her in-laws, or possessed any true curiosity about her past, about the gentleman in Hyde Park, Mrs. Bond on Gower Street, or the customers in Poplar who had sat on the benches of her coffeehouse. Eventually, the opportunity to truly know Elisabeth Stride would slip away with her killer into the shadows.

They began their lives in deficit. Not only were most of them born into working-class families; they were also born female. Before they had even spoken their first words or taken their first steps, they were regarded as less important than their brothers and more of a burden on the world than their wealthier female counterparts. Their worth was compromised before they had even attempted to prove it. They would never earn the income of a man; therefore, their education was of less importance.

Poor women’s labor was cheap because poor women were considered expendable and because society did not designate them as a family’s breadwinner. Unfortunately, many of them had to be. If a husband, father, or partner left or died, a working-class woman with dependents would find it almost impossible to survive. The structure of society ensured that a woman without a man was superfluous.

Just as it did in the nineteenth century, the notion that the victims were “only prostitutes” perpetuates the belief that there are good women and bad women, madonnas and whores. It suggests that there is an acceptable standard of female behavior, and those who deviate from it are fit to be punished.

it reasserts the double standard, exonerating men from wrongs committed against such women. These attitudes may not feel as prevalent as they were in 1888, but they persist. They may not be expressed freely in general conversation, as they would have been in Edward Fairfield’s day; rather, they have been integrated subtly into the fabric of our cultural norms.

At its very core, the story of Jack the Ripper is a narrative of a killer’s deep, abiding hatred of women, and our culture’s obsession with the mythology serves only to normalize its particular brand of misogyny.

By embracing him, we embrace the set of values that surrounded him in 1888, which teaches women that they are of a lesser value and can expect to be dishonored and abused. We enforce the notion that “bad women” deserve punishment and that “prostitutes” are a subspecies of female.

The victims of Jack the Ripper were never “just prostitutes”; they were daughters, wives, mothers, sisters, and lovers. They were women. They were human beings, and surely that in itself is enough.