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

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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