Reviews tagging 'Physical abuse'

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

33 reviews

abby_can_read's review against another edition

informative medium-paced

4.0

🎧
I enjoyed this book. It was well research and well written. 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Alcoholism, Classism, Misogyny, Violence, Death, Physical abuse, Addiction, Alcohol, Domestic abuse, and Murder

Moderate: Grief, Child death, Sexism, Toxic relationship, Infidelity, and Sexual violence

Minor: Chronic illness and Mental illness

revived_reading's review against another edition

dark emotional informative mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced

5.0

The way Hallie Rubenhold writes, you can feel every single emotion she tries to convey. From dread to a bit of hope to powerless. 

This book opens your eyes not only to the lives of these 5 women, but to the lives of many, many women in the Victorian era. 

Hallie Rubenhold truly gave back these women their stories and their lives. She gave them the respect they were never given. She gave them justice. 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Infidelity, Injury/Injury detail, Toxic relationship, Alcoholism, Grief, Medical content, Pregnancy, and Abandonment

Moderate: Terminal illness, Suicide, Death of parent, Physical abuse, Infidelity, Child death, and Domestic abuse

annamorgan27's review against another edition

dark emotional informative slow-paced

3.5

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Death, Domestic abuse, Terminal illness, Death of parent, Infidelity, Misogyny, Addiction, Alcoholism, Alcohol, Pregnancy, Child death, Forced institutionalization, Miscarriage, Murder, and Physical abuse

Moderate: Trafficking, Sexism, Sexual assault, Sexual content, and Violence

violetturtledove's review against another edition

challenging emotional informative reflective sad medium-paced

5.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Addiction and Alcoholism

Moderate: Classism, Death of parent, Mental illness, Sexism, Domestic abuse, Grief, Miscarriage, and Pregnancy

Minor: Child death, Trafficking, and Physical abuse

vixenreader's review against another edition

challenging dark emotional informative reflective sad tense medium-paced

4.75

It is good to see the victims of Jack the Ripper as human beings instead of faceless statistics to be gawked at. 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Death of parent, Death, Domestic abuse, Emotional abuse, Miscarriage, Murder, Physical abuse, Alcoholism, Misogyny, Toxic relationship, Violence, Addiction, Alcohol, Body shaming, Mental illness, Sexism, Sexual harassment, Sexual content, Sexual assault, Child death, and Sexual violence

Moderate: Forced institutionalization, Grief, Trafficking, Gun violence, Infidelity, Medical content, Injury/Injury detail, Medical trauma, and Rape

Minor: Racism, Gore, and Xenophobia

There is a lot of talk about the abuse within the workhouses and dissolving of familial dynamics.

geraldinerowe's review

challenging dark emotional informative reflective sad fast-paced

5.0

An extraordinarily well researched book which really brings to life the five women it documents. It is both fascinating and utterly heartbreaking, not because of their tragic ends, but because hundreds of thousands of other women lived in similar conditions (and the men's lives weren't much better). None of these five women started life in the doss houses of Whitechapel. They all spiralled downward, mostly through no fault of their own, but all due to the way society and the law was weighted against the poor and especially against women. They all had turned to drink, but who wouldn't be tempted to numb the pain of such an awful existence with a bit of gin-induced oblivion, even if it meant sleeping on the streets that night? This book taught me so much about the lives of the working classes in late Victorian London, which I thought I already understood. I did not.

I've read two criticisms of this book. Firstly that it's all conjecture. It's not, it's just very well researched. I suspect much of the detail comes from newspaper reports of the character witnesses' statements at the victims' inquests (I'm afraid I'm not a great reader of footnotes, but the author does reference her sources in detail). Newspaper coverage of trials and the like were very detailed at that time and reported almost word for word (although the author must have had a job filtering out the more sensational reporting). The other criticism I've heard is that, by putting so much emphasis on the fact that most of the victims, contrary to popular belief, were not prostitutes, the author was part of that section of society which believes sex workers' lives are less valuable or not worthy of saving. I agree that most of the book does have this feel, but it's clearly not what the author believes, as her conclusion makes clear.

This is THE book to read about the Whitechapel Murders (unless, of course, you just want to get off on reading about violence against women, which most Ripper books seem to pander to). Looking at the victims not only gives them the much overdue respect they deserve, but also shows us that their murderer was far more likely to have been one of the frequenters of the doss houses in the Flower and Dean Street area than a royal, a surgeon or a mysterious American.

I don't believe in an afterlife, but if I'm wrong I hope the five unfortunate women we meet in this book are finally finding some comfort by having their stories told so sympathetically. Five stars.

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Content Warnings

Moderate: Alcoholism

Minor: Trafficking, Physical abuse, Murder, Mental illness, Domestic abuse, Death, Terminal illness, Death of parent, Chronic illness, Child death, and Misogyny

frantically's review against another edition

dark emotional sad slow-paced

2.25

First; the few positive aspects: While I'm well versed in English royal history from the middle ages to the present, I've rarely spent a lot of time on the working class. This book showed me all the gruesome and mainly sad details that life in the 1880s had to offer, even worse for the women. If this had been the sole topic of the book, I would've given it 5 stars. 

But it wasn't — it was about the victims of Jack the Ripper. To some degree, I understand what the author was trying to argue. Women's history, no matter their social standing is a hard historical field to work in, with so much history being written by and from men. I should know — it's what I focus most of my uni research on. I think it's important to recognize that only two of the Ripper's canonical five victims ever worked as prostitutes, as a murderer is defined by his victims and thus, it is just plain wrong to call him "a murderer of prostitutes". 

Way too often, though, the entire argumentation was built on the premise that the five weren't "just prostitutes". That they were daughters, mothers, sisters, who'd fallen on hard times, who'd had lives that were more than their murder. But the thing is this — no woman, no person for that matter, no matter how morally corrupt they were, deserves to be brutally murdered. Rubenhold often paraphrases quotes of the time, calling prostitutes "whores", and doesn't clearly state that she views them any differently. 

When describing Annie, she states that "[c]ontrary to romanticized images of the Ripper’s victims, she never 'walked the streets' in a low-cut bodice and rouged cheeks, casting provocative glances beneath the gas lamps.", even after she had made clear that most of the women who worked as prostitutes had horrible lives that were filled with terror and that it wasn't seen as a last resource for these women. 

In the conclusion the author says that through clinging to the mythology of The Ripper, "we enforce the notion that 'bad women' deserve punishment and that 'prostitutes' are a subspecies of female.", which just feels like a bad joke. Putting the blame on us, her readership, doesn't erase the fact that throughout the entire book, the author herself contributes to defining prostitutes as a subspecies of women. 

After all, the five victims were never "just prostitutes". If they were, maybe this book would've never been written. 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Alcoholism, Death, Child death, Alcohol, Physical abuse, Trafficking, Toxic relationship, and Domestic abuse

Moderate: Murder and Death of parent

walkie_check's review against another edition

dark emotional informative sad medium-paced

4.5

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Content Warnings

Moderate: Alcoholism, Domestic abuse, Abandonment, Addiction, Alcohol, Classism, Drug abuse, Emotional abuse, Sexism, and Toxic relationship

Minor: Violence, Sexual harassment, Sexism, Police brutality, Physical abuse, Misogyny, Infidelity, Forced institutionalization, Trafficking, Religious bigotry, Miscarriage, Kidnapping, and Child death

vasha's review against another edition

informative reflective sad fast-paced

5.0

This is a rather extraordinary book, and also a sad, almost depressing one. Why were writers, and many police, in 1888 certain that the five women murdered in Whitechapel were prostitutes? That's a question that Rubenhold, while demonstrating that at least three of them could not fit any possible definition of "prostitute," goes into in some detail (at much less length, in her angry final chapter, she considers the unsavory cultural factors which make Jack the Ripper's image as a killer of prostitutes a quasi-heroic one to this day). What it comes down to, as I interpreted it, is that in the Victorian upper- and middle-class mind, in the misogynist mind, classifying a woman as simply "a prostitute" was a way of ceasing to think about her at all: a woman's value resting on the foundation of the purity and "guardedness" of her sexuality, a woman whose sexuality was regarded as "public" had no basis on which to be valued at all, and it was easy to regard all those placed in this category as undifferentiated, and think that the details of their lives really didn't matter. And, as a corollary to "prostitution" being regarded as ultimate unvalued condition, all women who were outside social approval for any reason (having left their husband, being disorderly on the streets, whatever) were lumped into a single category to which the term "prostitute" could be applied (although the police were more cautious about the use of the term since they had a legal definition and standards of proof to adhere to, and knew that that definition would only fit a limited number of women). But the thought-stopping effect of creating a mental category of "common prostitutes" means that people in 1888, and (shamefully) since, did not need to consider the murdered women as individual lives, did not need to see them as human beings as familiar as the ones they personally knew, could leave them as props in a tableau for gawking fascination. This is just as unjust to women who did do sex work as to those who didn't: whichever was true of each of the five women in this book, Hallie Rubenhold has set out to at last do justice to her as an individual, as a personality, as a person who made choices and did far, far more over the course of her life than be on the streets of Whitechapel at one moment which put her name in the newspapers.

Beyond this fundamental wrongdoing, what I found depressing about The Five was that before these five women ended up in direst poverty and squalor in Whitechapel, each led a life quite different from the others. One was raised in a poor working-class neighborhood in London, one in the quarters of an elite cavalry regiment, one on a farm in Sweden, one in a family of skilled tinworkers of the industrial Midlands, and one (perhaps) in a well-to-do family in Wales. Some of them married, some didn't; one rose  to nearly middle-class status; some worked in domestic service, but another was an itinerant ballad-hawker, and still another was in the elegant upper ranks of the sex trade; they all experienced periods of a much better life than what they lived in their final years, but what that consisted of was different in each case. The factors that brought them to adversity were equally varied, but putting them all together paints a picture of an interwoven system of social stratification and patriarchy that could and did all too easily crush women. Annie Chapman, who tried very hard for respectability, fared no better than Kate Eddowes, who boldly flouted society. Reading about these different lives all leading to the same place has made it hard, for the moment, for me to believe in happy endings in Victorian fiction because I'm feeling like these women weren't unlucky, but rather those who lived in peace were the remarkably lucky ones.

On a side note, I've read the graphic novel From Hell (which I can't recommend) and its author, in the course of thinking he's portraying the women of Whitechapel sympathetically, states that they were all prostitutes because that was the only job they could (were allowed to) do. How wrong he was, and what a superficial thinker! I'll leave it to readers of "The Five" to learn the wide variety of expedients that they turned to in order to get each day's food, and hopefully a bed each night; they were determined, experienced, and ingenious, and what's more they had the generous assistance of others in the same plight, returning the favor when they happened to have an extra penny.

I can highly recommend the audiobook, superbly read by Louise Brealey; the print version is also worthwhile for its illustrations and footnotes. 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Child death, Chronic illness, Misogyny, and Alcoholism

Moderate: Medical content, Murder, Pregnancy, Infertility, Physical abuse, Terminal illness, Classism, Death of parent, Domestic abuse, Forced institutionalization, Medical trauma, Miscarriage, Sexual harassment, and Trafficking

Minor: Grief, Mental illness, and Sexual violence

epeolatri's review against another edition

challenging dark emotional informative mysterious reflective sad slow-paced

5.0

I have never heard anything about the women killed by jack the ripper before this book. It was very well informed and I’m so glad I read it. As the author said, it is important to remember these women as human beings and not just victims of a famous man. 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Infidelity, Addiction, Sexism, Mental illness, Misogyny, Violence, Classism, Death, Alcoholism, Child death, Alcohol, and Murder

Moderate: Cursing, Sexual violence, Physical abuse, Domestic abuse, Emotional abuse, Pregnancy, Religious bigotry, and Sexual content