Hallie RUBENHOLD : The Five - the untold lives of the women killed by Jack the Ripper

Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine and Mary-Jane are famous for the same thing, though they never met. They came from Fleet Street, Knightsbridge, Wolverhampton, Sweden and Wales. They wrote ballads, ran coffee houses, lived on country estates, they breathed ink-dust from printing presses and escaped people-traffickers.
What they had in common was the year of their murders : 1888.
Their murderer was never identified, but the name created for him by the press has become far more famous than any of these five women.
Now, in this devastating narrative of five lives, historian Hallie Rubenholds finally sets the record straight and gives these women back their stories.

Almost no mention of Jack the Ripper in this book - he has already been studied and somewhat glorified all over. This is all about those five overlooked women, but also the women and men who lived back in those days in Victorian Great-Britain. It's not a very uplifting read ! It depressed me some but also made me angry. Such riches all around and so many people sleeping in the streets ? And has it changed much today ?...

"The values of the Victorian world. They are male, authoritarian and middle class. They were formed at a time when women had no voice and few rights, and the poor were considered lazy and degenerate : to have been both of these things was one of the worst possible combination." A poor woman in those days, when she was alone (and by alone, I mean with no male companion), generally had little choice between begging and whoring. I couldn't help thinking what I would have become back then, a divorced woman with two children. And when I think that when a man cheated on his wife with the pretty neighbour, if the wife left her home, she couldn't move in with another man without her husband's permission, while the husband could perfectly live with the pretty neighbour !

"Mary Higgs, who went undercover as a female tramp, was horrified to find that in her ragged dress she was continuously verbally assaulted by men. "I had never realised before that a lady's dress, or even that of a respectable working woman, was a protection", she wrote. "The bold, free look of a man at a destitute woman must be felt to be realised."

The other common fact about all these women is that they all took to drinking. But is that reason enough to justify their savage murder ? After all, what do the tramps do today to forget what happened to them and where they are ? And what would you, or I, do if such things happened to us ? They probably wouldn't have gotten there if society's attitude to women had been different, they would have had more choice. But what Hallie Rubenhold tells us about those living conditions is simply appalling. The death, hunger, diseases, the workhouses... Even the anecdote of that working woman who got arrested for solliciting when she was simply going out on her own to buy gloves !

Hallie Rubenhold wrote a very well-researched book, just look at the bibliography at the end, it's amazing how much material she went through ! I simply can't believe nobody paid any attention to those women for more than a century. Hallie Rubenhold did them justice in that wonderful tribute.
And if you want to know how the "other half" lived while everybody reads historical novels about nobles, kings, princesses and the like, you will find everything you need in here, and plentiful leads to explore the subject more.