The Five

There is so much rage between every line of this book.

There has been a lot of faux-intellectual lip service paid to our obsession with bad things. With bad men, with the brutally victimized, with the salacious details. Two things have opened my eyes a bit as to why we do this - the worldwide spread of COVID-19 and Uncover's most recent season detailing the Satanic Panic of the 1980s -, and it's interesting to me that I don't often hear it put to words. It's about control. It's about the consensual experience of negative emotion, a form of practicing for the real thing. You're scared about a worldwide pandemic, so you gorge yourself on the news and watch Contagion and Outbreak on loop. You're choosing to expose yourself to these things, and that control makes you feel a little bit better (unless it doesn't, in which case, stop). You're a suburban mom in the 1980s, part of a generation of women heading into the workforce and leaving your children with strangers at a daycare center, and in order to quell your anxiety you allow yourself to believe a fiction about those strangers. It's easier to create boogymen that make sense to you (Satanists) than to recognize the real ones (family members, clergymen, etc) because that way you don't have to question your worldviews.

We're fascinated by Jack the Ripper because it is easier to be fascinated than scared. And when its women who are victimized, we tell ourselves that they were bad women, different women, in order to convince ourselves that it won't happen to us and our own. If we're virtuous, if we teach our daughters to do the right things, the bad men won't choose us - they'll choose those women instead. But it's a lie - a self-congratulating, individualistic lie built on our worst instincts and propped up by institutions that benefit from this lie.

The five canonical victims of Jack the Ripper made good and bad choices in their lives - but this book also makes clear that because they were women and because they were born in the time period they were, they had very few choices that they could make. After the first two stories - Polly Nichols and Annie Chapman - I began to worry that each of these tales would be nothing but despair. Polly's life was a bleak haze of alcoholism and homelessness, and Annie's fall from middle class comfort to addiction, depression and poverty is one of the saddest things I've ever heard. But there was also so much more to all of them. Liz Stride, despite her gut-wrenching early years of being forced to live as a prostitute simply because Swedish law mistook her for one, had some fascinating shape-shifting abilities, morphing herself from a naive farm girl into a deft con artist. Catherine Eddowes was a talented lyricist and street performer, whose funeral was attended by thousands. Mary Jane Kelly escaped trafficking, had a worldly reputation, and was part of tight-knit family of working girls who she was loyal to. Annie used to sell her crochet work, and Polly sounds like she would have been a rabble-rousing anarchist if she was born in a later time.

All of them struggled with alcohol, all of them fought to survive under the boot of patriarchy, misogyny, and classism. They lived in a world where their lives were meaningless without the protection of a marriage, and yet they stepped out on their own anyway, in the face of impossible odds. Only Mary Kelly regularly worked as a prostitute, and in fact for a time lived an exciting and relatively comfortable life before being targeted by traffickers, and had to live more anonymously after her escape. The rest simply had the misfortune of not being able to put a roof over their heads on the wrong night, in the wrong city, on the wrong street corner. The fact that the myth of their supposed profession, printed in newspapers at the time simply to sell more copies, has persisted to this day says a lot about the way we choose to see the victims of violence. Other women. Not me. It'll never happen to me.

There is something to be said about the fact that we have deified and canonized a man who killed vulnerable women in their sleep as some kind of criminal genius. He targeted people who could not put up a fight and would not be missed. The easiest of prey. The institutions that kept Polly, Annie, Liz, Catharine and Mary down - keeping them from being able to live alone, to care for themselves, branding them adulterers, prostitutes, and failed women - did most of the work for him. As hard as it is to read these stories, and as easy as it is to breath a sigh of relief and be grateful that things are so much better for women today, I would not let out that breath just yet. This is still happening. And it's important to know how disenfranchisement and institutionalized misogyny actually function, because there are plenty of people today who would send us right back. The rage in this book is not just for the injustice of history, but for the fact that its still relevant today.

I appreciated the research done here to tell the stories of these 5 women who have been historically written off as prostitutes or less than deserving of humanity. Rubenhold's introduction and conclusion draw parallels from Victorian values to modern misogyny in law cases, (e.g. Brock Turner), where men are centered as if they're the victim in their own crimes and women are thus further harmed. However, because of all the research, it felt like a number by number accounting of facts about these women's lives rather than a compelling narrative, so it wasn't a particularly gripping read.

I shelved this as “true crime” because the subjects of this book are all linked by Jack the Ripper, but I really loved how this didn't focus on the murderer at all, really, and didn't delve into all the gore and details of the murders themselves. There are a lot of ethical issues with true crime, especially when it comes to murder, but I feel like this did a good job of avoiding those and really telling the stories of these women. I got really drawn into the stories, and even though I knew how they would all end, I found myself hoping that they'd find a way to escape what I knew was going to happen. The author gets so much detail from public records and really manages to make these women into fully realized people.