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

Content Warning: This section of the guide contains explicit descriptions of sex work, alcohol dependency, sex trafficking, domestic violence, child neglect, and death by suicide.

Historical narratives about women can reflect biases and stereotypes from the time the narratives were written. Hallie Rubenhold argues that the treatment of Jack the Ripper’s “canonical” five victims has echoed and preserved Victorian attitudes toward women and morality. To counter these tendencies, Rubenhold seeks to expose and question the misrepresentation of women in history.

Rubenhold cites the still-widespread and mistaken idea that all five victims were sex workers, when the evidence suggests only Mary Kelly and Elisabeth Stride practiced sex work. The Victorian press even suggested that “the majority of women who inhabited” the lodging houses of Whitechapel were “with very few exceptions […] all sex workers” (22). As Rubenhold repeatedly points out, this assumption was false: Many poor and lower-class women in Whitechapel and elsewhere in the East End performed a variety of odd jobs, often alternating between workhouses, rooms in boarding houses, and living on the streets when they did not have sufficient funds to secure a room.

While the view painting most poor, unhoused women as sex workers was influenced by the Victorian media’s common views of Whitechapel, it was also buttressed by more general Victorian ideas of the “fallen woman” (86).