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

by Hallie Rubenhold

“Autumn of Terror”

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.

Jack the Ripper never had sex with a single victim.

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.

give back to them that which was so brutally taken away with their lives: their dignity.

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.

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.

The male carrier was exempt

This attitude was not out of step with Victorian working-class sentiments about domestic violence; frequently the woman was blamed for the beatings she received.

they were regarded as less important than their brothers and more of a burden on the world than their wealthier female counterparts.

Poor women’s labor was cheap because poor women were considered expendable

In the absence of any evidence that Polly, Annie, and Kate had ever engaged in common prostitution, many have taken to claiming that these women participated in “casual prostitution,”

“houseless creature” and a “prostitute” by their moral failings were one and the same.

The larger his profile grows, the more those of his victims seem to fade.

It suggests that there is an acceptable standard of female behavior, and those who deviate from it are fit to be punished.

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.

We have grown so comfortable with the notion of “Jack the Ripper,” the unfathomable, invincible male killer, that we have failed to recognize that he continues to walk among us.

In order to keep him alive, we have had to forget his victims.

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.