leblonk 's review for:

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

3.0

dark informative slow-paced

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Alright, praise first: this book is fantastic for giving the social, political, and moral context for the Ripper killings. It's chock full of historical information and has a ton of references to primary sources. The prose is good, nothing special, but good, solid, educated writing. The concept is good too; it was really interesting to learn more about the Ripper victims than simply how they died. 

Rubenhold paints a clear picture of the stark realities of the time with tidbits like this: "On one occasion, health inspectors found five children sharing a bed alongside a dead sibling awaiting burial." Chilling stuff, and I like that she doesn't sensationalize such tragedies but merely presents them to the reader. 

On the debit side, and this outweighs the credit quite a bit for me, Rubenhold clearly has a thesis, and she is willing to bend facts to breaking point to support it. She believes that Jack the Ripper, rather than targeting prostitutes, was simply attacking vulnerable women who were sleeping rough, and in fact, most of the women killed were not prostitutes at all. 

I don't mind her having an opinion, but her arguments are often weak, and the idea of the women not being prostitutes is actually irrelevant to the book she's written. 

She puts forward the facts that none of the victims had sex with their killer, that there were no signs of struggle, and no screams were heard as evidence that the murdered women were not sex workers. None of these facts preclude prostitution, only rape. 

She berates the police for assuming that the women were prostitutes because they were poor and because of where they were found. I agree that it shouldn’t have been taken as read, but given the locale and the poverty level, it wasn’t an unreasonable working hypothesis. 

In her account of Annie Chapman, she states that “virtually all that is known about Annie Chapman’s life in Whitechapel is drawn from this morass of confused ‘facts’ reported in the newspapers.” In spite of this, she presents her account of Annie’s time in Whitechapel as certainty, not as guesswork or probable inferences. Then, too, mere paragraphs after justifiably throwing doubt over the news reports, she cites those same reports without question, caution, or qualifier because they happen to support her argument that Annie was not a prostitute. Things like this annoyed me enough that quite minor instances of overstating her case or being very certain in her language began to grate on my nerves. A lot of reasonable assumptions are given as facts, and that more or less killed this book for me. 

In her conclusion, Rubenhold asserts “the belief that ‘Jack the Ripper was a killer of prostitutes’... does not bear scrutiny,” but I must disagree. By her own account, most of the victims were prostitutes at one time or another, and even if they weren’t, they were killed in an area known for prostitution in a time when social mores equated poverty with sex work; Jack may well have thought them prostitutes when he killed them. 

The dogged determination to assert that Jack the Ripper wasn’t killing prostitutes sinks this book, and it’s a shame, because the research is great, the material is interesting, and the goal to humanize women who are usually regarded as footnotes in their own deaths is admirable! Further on in the conclusion, she states, “The victims of Jack the Ripper were never ‘just prostitutes’; they were daughters, wives, mothers, sisters, and lovers. They were women. They were human beings, and surely that in itself is enough.” I fervently wish that she had taken this as her thesis! 

The book is worth reading for the history, but you do need to ignore a lot of very obviously manipulative language.