Hallie Rubenhold’s new history of the women murdered by Jack the Ripper is a revelation.
There’s a tendency to backtrack when it comes to history, and see tragedy as inevitable rather than the result of a confluence of unique historical circumstances. There’s also a tendency to equate someone’s present circumstance with the life they deserve they to live, and to see a person’s rock-bottom as their status quo. Hallie Rubenhold’s new history of the five women killed by Jack the Ripper is the perfect antidote to all these tendencies, and will make you question everything you thought you knew about Jack the Ripper’s victims, including the long-held (but never proven) assumption that these five women were prostitutes, when in truth, most of these women had never worked in the sex industry, but were instead poor, homeless, alcoholic women who were merely assumed to be prostitutes by Victorian society.
In her brilliant social history of these five women’s lives, Rubenhold restores each woman’s humanity through an intimate and empathetic examination of her life, her choices, and her struggle against circumstance. None of Jack the Ripper’s victims had an appointment with destiny when he took their lives—they were ripped from the world prematurely, after lifetimes of struggle, heartache, and occasional happiness. Their stories deserve to be told, and their unknown murderer left by the wayside, not turned into a celebrity while his victims fall further and further into obscurity. Hallie Rubenhold was kind enough to chat with me via email about the new book.
Molly Odintz: So, let’s start with the book’s big reveal: Jack the Ripper was not killing prostitutes. He was killing “houseless creatures,” some of whom engaged in sex work at various points in their lives, at a time period when homelessness was frequently considered evidence of prostitution. Tell us about how the idea that Jack the Ripper was targeting prostitutes, and how Victorian attitudes skewed perceptions of their real lives.
Hallie Rubenfold: Victorian society tended to conflate the concept of a fallen woman (a woman who had transgressed the sexual norms and who had had sex outside of marriage) and a broken woman (a woman who had failed at the conventional role of being a woman; she had failed at being a wife or a mother; she may have had an addiction issue, been separated from her family and husband, had no home, or she may have had mental health problems). Both the fallen woman and the broken woman were seen as morally deficient—one became the other. Because all of these women were out on the street at night, and no decent woman would have been out on the street at night by herself, and especially not in one of the worst parts of town, the natural conclusions were drawn. Being homeless, being a woman separated from her family, being an alcoholic, being dirty and ‘unfeminine’ made you a defective woman, one who had no moral value anymore. When these women were found dead, the police and the press assumed what it was natural for any Victorian to assume at the time.
There’s quite a bit in the book about attitudes towards women alcoholics—you speak of how lower-class women were particularly shamed for taking to the bottle. How did alcoholism, and Victorian attitudes about alcoholism, affect the lives of these five women?
“People often think, erroneously, that it’s impossible to explore the lives of the poor because we don’t have the usual cache of memoirs, letters, diaries, etc., but to suggest that we can only build a picture of a life when those sources are available is just ridiculous.”When a woman takes to the bottle, she compromises herself—she ceases to be a decent woman any longer. The middle classes tended to look down on the poor for their drinking habits, which isn’t to say that the middle and upper classes didn’t drink (or take opiates, like laudanum), but alcoholism was associated with a slide into the worst sort of poverty and immorality—crime, prostitution, violence, the break down of the family. However, in many senses this link was not an incorrect one to draw; addiction did and does still destroy the lives of the poor and the unhappy who tend to reach for substances to escape their misery. Alcohol was cheaper than food and difficult to escape entirely. If someone could manage to resist alcohol, the money they could save might really make the difference between living a life on the margins and having a slightly better lifestyle and more promise for their children.
The Five is social history at its best; you’re able to take data gathered in the time period or statistics assembled by later historians, and extrapolate an individual’s potential feelings and evidence of choices. You’re literally restoring the humanity to women whose lives were frequently traceable only through either statistics recorded by reformers or data recorded by government and religious functionaries. Can you talk a bit about social history and how you worked through data to extrapolate the experience of these five women?
People often think, erroneously, that it’s impossible to explore the lives of the poor because we don’t have the usual cache of memoirs, letters, diaries, etc., but to suggest that we can only build a picture of a life when those sources are available is just ridiculous. In fact there is a vast amount of material which attests to how the poor and those otherwise forgotten by history lived. I used censuses, workhouse records, parish records, birth and death records, military records, wills, police records and newspapers to help build a framework of these women’s lives. Then, it’s possible to layer on top of this, what we know about the lives of other people in those same circumstances to give us a range of possibilities for what an individual’s experiences might have been. Lower class women didn’t have many choices in life, so it’s easy to narrow down what those experiences might have been.
While these five women died destitute, their lives were marked by upwards and downwards swings in fortune, making your book a necessary lesson in the truth that how these (and other) women died was only a small part of the story of how they lived. Was it a surprise to you, researching, that many of these women had access to more resources at various points in time than many others of the working classes, or were such ups and downs typical of women of this social class in this time period?
It really depends. One of the interesting thing about examining 19th century lives is that certainly by the second half of the century, society had become more aware of social problems and there was a wide array of charitable programmes and organisations who were actively trying to help people out of poverty. The Dowgate School, which Kate Eddowes attended was an example of this, as was the scheme of social housing that Polly Nichols and her family lived in. Elizabeth Stride received charity through her church and Annie Chapman spent time in a newly founded rehabilitation centre for women. With the exception of Mary Jane Kelly, about whose life we know very little, all of these women had access to charitably endowed projects at one point or another during their lives. However, it was extremely difficult in some cases to break the cycle of poverty when the only acceptable roles in society for women were as wives and mothers (and married mothers at that). The best a single woman who needed to earn her own income could hope for was to become a domestic servant.
To piggyback off that question, you stress the role of agency in each woman’s life—each of these women made many choices, sometimes facing significant opposition to their chosen path and pursuing their own way regardless. Often missing from the discussions of poor women’s lives are the many choices they make, and I wonder if you could talk about some of the more interesting or unusual choices made by these five women.
While these women had agency in their lives, I would be careful not overstate just how much agency they had! The cards were stacked against them. For example—Polly may have chosen to leave her husband because he was having a relationship with a neighbour, but leaving William Nichols was like jumping off a cliff without a parachute. She knew she would be socially ruined by this move and we don’t know if she regretted it later—she might very well have done so. Elizabeth Stride chose, for a time to return to street prostitution, as did Mary Jane Kelly in order to make ends meet. While this was a choice they made, it would have been a miserable one.
“Families had to do their best in the worst possible circumstances. People love each other in different ways—often its adversity which draws individuals closer.”You elected not to talk about Jack the Ripper in this book—what was behind this choice?
A library of books has already been written about the Ripper—he/she/they don’t require any further exploration. On the other hand, the victims’ stories have never been known by the general public and it was more important, I felt for us to be able to hear their voices without Jack also being a player in this drama and stealing any of the limelight. The killer has had his day—it’s time to move on and tell another story.
The Victorian Era, with its endless shaming of those stuck in the cycle of violence, poverty, and addiction, comes off as the real villain of the book. What part did Victorian attitudes play in increasing the vulnerability of The Five to their later fate?
I like to say that it was Victorian society that killed these women long before the Ripper got to them. Society didn’t allow women, especially working class women to better themselves. It wasn’t just society from the top down, but their own communities too. A woman was never seen as a breadwinner, any work she could secure paid less than what a man could bring home—and this was intentional because women were less valued by society. Their main role was to be carers in the home, to look after their families and their husbands. That was it. The moment a society prevents a woman from ever being able to look after herself is the moment it takes away her safety net and guarantees her suffering if fate turns against her.
There’s a lot of love and kindness in this book—the message I got out of this book was that is was incredibly hard to keep a family together or make one’s own way in the time period, and yet the families in your book never stop striving for happiness, or attempting to address unhappy situations. What did researching this book reveal to you about love and family life in the Victorian Era?
Families had to do their best in the worst possible circumstances. People love each other in different ways—often its adversity which draws individuals closer. I feel that Polly and her father shared a special father-daughter bond, and Annie and her husband John seemed to weather many storms together. Even Kate’s bond with her commonlaw partner, Thomas Conway seemed to be based on love, before it became violent—then it appears to have taken the form of many co-dependent relationships today. If researching this book has demonstrated anything to me, its how far we have come as a society, in spite of all our troubles.
