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.

Traditional women’s labor, such as domestic service, laundry work, sewing, or home-assembly piecework, did not yield a livable wage. Unless a woman could take refuge with another male family member, she would hardly be able to support herself.

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.

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.

While the methods of enforcing regulation varied between countries, the concept that they all shared in common was that women in the sex trade should shoulder the blame for the transmission of syphilis. It was believed that if the state could control the morally corrupt “fallen woman,” the instrument of the disease’s spread, then the problem could be isolated. The male carrier was exempt from any such regulation.

Catherine, whose body had been ravaged by childbearing, physical labor, and poor nutrition, had, at forty-two, lived the average number of years for a woman of her class at that time.

According to the Telegraph, which was echoing the prejudices of its era while also attempting to tell a more salacious story, homeless women and women who sold sex were one and the same.

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.

The double standard ensured that although it might not be entirely acceptable for a man to seek sexual relations with a number of women, it was completely understandable, and even normal. A woman, on the other hand, could have sex with a man only if she was legally married to him.

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.