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

by Hallie Rubenhold

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.

Of the many tragedies that befell Annie Chapman in the final years of her life, perhaps one of the most poignant was that she needn’t have been on the streets on that night, or on any other. Ill and feverish, she needn’t have searched the squalid corners for a spot to sleep. Instead, she might have lain in a bed in her mother’s house or in her sisters’ care, on the other side of London. She might have been treated for tuberculosis; she might have been comforted by the embraces of her children or the loving assurances of her family. 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.

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!”20 With hindsight, Barnardo claimed that he believed the woman who spoke those words might very well have been Elisabeth Stride. In truth, they all might have been Elisabeth Stride, and certainly Elisabeth strove to be all of those women—everyone and no one. 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.

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.

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.

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.