I looked up the book. Sounds fascinating and tragic.

Ive read it over the summer and it's absolutely astounding! So much i never knew about how the victorians thought and acted is well-described in this book.

I listened to her podcast last year. Totally changed the way I see the Ripper stories.

>. These 5 women didn't scream, so it's now known that they were killed while sleeping on the street.

They all slept in lodging houses, though? One of the victims was literally found in her bed. And they did prostitute themselves.

Her podcast is fantastic too!

Bad Women

She gives some excellent arguments as to why they most likely weren't all prostitutes.

She also goes into some depth to explain the lodging system at the time and how you could still be forced to sleep on the street.

Excellent book!

It’s a hugely enjoyable and well-researched book. I really hope it won’t stay her only published work. I also loved her podcast, Bad Women (can be found on Spotify), which is well-produced and really gives you even more insights into her work and the lives of these women. She is doing a second season right now, on female murder victims during the London Blitz.

But prostitution was often a part time activety for extra money.

> And they did prostitute themselves.

The point of the book is literally to make a case against this assumption.

Another +1 for this book. I particularly admired how she refused to center their murderer, nor to give any attention to the gruesome details of their deaths, which has all been hashed over again and again. This is a book about the victims and their lives.

No. 4 of them were sleeping on the street because lodging houses charged money.

Have you read the book?

Well said and certainly why I think the book such a great read. Those victims did suffer through their poverty, homelessness, food insecurity, and being dipsomaniacs.

You payed a penny for a bed, right? This is what scares me about certain topics, everyboedy has an agenda and a bias, at least if you know it going in, you can account for it.

What difference does it make if they did or didn't, either way they didn't deserve to get their livers ripped out.

Right, it doesn't really make a difference anyway

It makes a difference because the label prostitute is still used as a shorthand that a woman wasn’t a valuable human being. It would make me wonder about the political agenda behind the reporting of the murders (I haven’t read the book, it’s going on my list now).

She's written a number of books mainly focussed on sex workers. Her most famous work is Covent Garden Ladies which Hulu used as inspiration for Harlots (An amazing TV show.) She's also written some fiction which I think is about a courtesan but I haven't got round to it yet so can't confirm exactly what it is about.

Only the last one was found in her bed. The others were found outside. Only one was actively working as a prostitute (the last one who was killed in doors). One had worked as a prostitute about 20 years before her murder but not since and the other three had no record or evidence that they were ever prostitutes. At least according to the book.

They didn't scream so we now know they were sleeping rough? (Cf lamentably recent & damnably lamentable court judgements and the Bible on the screaming though tbf a connection to homelessness isn't made even in those.) Having read that claim I strongly doubt the author has suggested a proof that the women weren't prostitutes rather than 'labelled' as ones. Surely the murder of a prostitute is as odious as that of someone labelled as one or indeed of anyone else. Assuming you mean the city of London & not the City of London, the poor weren't huddled in piles throughout it nor would they have been allowed by authorities to have been; they were most obviously concentrated & starving & driven to desperate measures & dying in the East End. There's nothing in the least celebratory about scones and tea.

I'm only going by what you say of the book. If I've got a good idea of it I think you might want to look further into its author's research before you celebrate it with stodgy bread rolls and milky tea.

I expect this will get downvoted, but I’m a professional historian who works on this era. And there were a few things I really didn’t love about this book.

But first— she’s completely right about the sometimes disgusting and exploitative approach that much popular media has shown toward the ripper’s victims, and the media’s assumptions that they were all prostitutes (and that that only means one thing). She’s right about all of that, and I think it’s great that she’s giving histories to these women who too often have just been portrayed as victims.

BUT… two things…

Despite what she claims, we (current historians) don’t really talk about “prostitutes” as much as we talk about “transactional sex,” which exists on a spectrum. Even from her book it’s clear that some of the five participated in transactional sex. Certainly hooking up with a man for a few weeks or months in order to provide yourself with food and shelter, then moving in to the next man. is a type of transactional sex common in this period, and is often framed as a type of prostitution, although a more stable and safer one than working in the house of prostitution, which itself is more stable and safer than streetwalking. Exchanging shelter/food/clothing/protection for sex was seen sometimes as different from taking cash (as is true now) but all are forms of transactional sex.

I was also uncomfortable with how much she seemed to need to argue that these women were not prostitutes. So what if they were? It leads her to speculate beyond her evidence. In particular, where she was arguing that a woman was out at midnight because she was planning to pawn a hat to get some money seemed like a massive reach to me, those shops wouldn’t be open at that hour— but she can’t admit that there’s even a possibility that sex was involved, and that’s a weakness.

I wanted the book to just be more up-to-date with its approach to transactional sex. If some of these women did engage in transactional sex – and there were a lot of different ways that could’ve happened – and it was also clear from the book at a couple of them did at times – well, so what? It’s a chance to talk about the social structures that made it impossible for women to earn a decent living and any disposable income in the absence of a male provider— which she does at times to her credit!— but not as much as she could’ve. She’s so busy dodging the prostitution charge that she doesn’t talk about the role transactional sex plays in a society with those kinds of restrictions… And the ways that in turn is absolutely a benefit to men in such a society.

I also wanted a little more on why there’s this prurient aspect to the media approach to the ripper’s victims. Again, if one or more of them were prostitutes, so what? That not all of them were makes it clear that the ripper was an opportunistic killer of women, and the reasons these women were so vulnerable is what unites them – regardless of whether or not one or more of them engaged in transactional sex. Adding a sex twist to murder has always sold papers, and she had a golden opportunity to talk about how easily and cheaply that was done here.

I just wanted more. And I wanted her to feel to be a little less aggressive with her “they NEVER!” She hasn’t got proof for that. What she does have is the fascinating stories of five women who have been misused by history, and who offer an important counterweight to the too-often glamorized Victorian age.

She also wrote an account of a true life scandal called 'The Scandalous Lady W' which is well worth reading and was made into a BBC mini series, also highly recommended.

Loved it too! Like you said : they got the prostitute label but when you read about their lives it's such a sad story.

It's been a while since I read The Five, but the impression I took away from the book was her frustration that all 5 had been generically labelled as prostitutes by the Victorian press, who had made a great deal of assumptions about the lives and morality of the Ripper's victims, with many of their contemporaries viewing their deaths as 'just deserts' or even a form of social cleansing. There's a few pages dedicated to the discussion of transactional sex vs prostitution as a livelihood, and the difficulty for the Victorian public of distinguishing between the two meant that all women who sold sex were tarred with the same brush - often unfairly - and it was assumed by the Victorian press that prostitution was a chosen career for these 'fallen women's who had separated from their husbands.

Whilst I agree that there is circumstantial evidence to suggest that they may all have engaged in transactional sex in order to survive, I think that the author was right to question the claims made by contemporary press that they were all prostitutes in the sense the Victorians would have understood the name. It was an occupation mired with shame, and I think Haille may have been trying to remove some of the stigma that came from being painted as a 'lady of the night' - which might have been a mistake on her part and she might have done better to emphasize that whether it was chosen work or a role thrust upon them, none of the 5 deserved to die as they did.

Four pence per night. Which many of them didn't have.

Only one victim was found in a rented room. The others died in the streets, where it was more than likely that they were trying to sleep.

4. Only Marie Jeanette was found in her bed. The others all died outside. Liz was in a covered alleyway, but it was still in the street. Kate, Polly and Annie were all trying to sleep outdoors.

I can’t even explain how much I love this book. There’s also a podcast series that goes over the lives of all the women!

Transactional sex is discussed in the book, but it wasn't these women's main profession which the newspapers claimed at that time and still sticks. A woman without a man at that time really had very little and there were no social safety nets. I thought her research very thorough.

Is the other end of the spectrum of transactional sex married women, or is there another word for that?

Frankly, in that time period it seems like it was transactional sex all the way up the ladder, although the folks at the top dressed it up with legalities.

Hence the street sleeping.

Thing is they probably were prostitutes. The number of full and part time prostitutes in Victorian London was high, high, high. A book claiming they were not prostitutes indicates some type of bias as well.

Jack the ripper books are often biased in one way or another, They all Love Jack by Bruce Robinson is a great example of a great book with a strong bias.

I really loved how she sourced her information too. One of my favorite things is looking through food notes and end notes of books to understand how an author built their research. I loved seeing how she built her case from there and kept digging showed she did more research than most. Certainly far more than the exploitative ripper tours and such. I used to work as a victim advocate and had really hoped this book would be a turning point in victim focused crime histories. The general public hasn’t fully shifted but I’ve definitely noticed an increased pushback and some more focus on victims. These women were all people with lives before their deaths and they didn’t exist just for one man to kill and everyone else since to exploit. I really loved how Rubenhold did her best to give them life again and how it reinforced her thesis.

Maybe it's like in Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time. When the narrative for the past century and a quarter has been "The victims were engaging in a risky line of work, so obviously they were gonna get whacked" instead of admitting that at least three-fifths of them had no discernible involvement with sex work, perhaps Rubenhold perceived a need for clear, repeated, unrelenting emphasis. Like... if everyone else has always said that every woman targeted by this murderer was engaging in sex work, despite a lack of evidence, I could excuse Rubenhold for pointing out say, three, four hundred times that that's just an assumption.

I can't remember where I saw this, but apparently the later Victorians offered the excuse that women who engaged in sex work were nymphomaniacs who just weren't getting the gold pipe at home. You know, anything rather than admit that their society was structured specifically to keep women desperate and dependent, and that that could be changed.

One difference is that it caused people ever since to stop there. Jack the ripper killed prostitutes. Cue a million crime dramas with the same storyline.

​

This book is phenomenal. She restores their stories, their individuality, their dignity, and she indicts victorian society which is what led to these women sleeping rough, being murdered, and then being written off as "just prostitutes". Of course prostitutes don't deserve to be murdered. But this story is so much more interesting than that. I cannot recommend the book enough.

Read the book.

I think this will end up being downvoted to shit because apparently Rubenhold makes a lot of men angry but I 100% agree - this book is a must read. I couldn't believe how much information she was able to glean about the women's lives and how varied they were, and how inevitably dragged down by victorian society which just left you so few options if you were a woman. I loved that she restored their lives, their individuality, their dignity, their stories.

If you'd like another great book about Jack the Ripper, check out They all Love Jack, by Bruce Robinson, wonderful style.

that's kind of the point though, the five isn't about the murderer.

You said it was a penny for a bed. I explained it was four pence a night, which is four times dearer. A penny could be easily borrowed. Finding four pence for a bed every night was not so straightforward.

Thank you, I didn’t know that!

Yes, and she’s absolutely right about that. May r I’m being completely unfair and criticizing the book she didn’t write, or the book I wish she’d written – I just wanted a little more nuance from her, and I don’t think it would’ve undermined her argument. I was also completely surprised to find out that the Ripper’s victims were not working prostitutes, and she’s done an amazing thing by recovering as much of their stories as she has.

As far as the media portraying them as prostitutes in a suggestion that ‘they deserved it’ – I kept thinking of the fact that the early tabloid photographer Weegee famously would carry a pair of women’s panties with him, and before he took a picture of a murder scene he would throw them down to make sure that they were in the foreground. Which is awful, but is to say that the media was trying to sell papers and the idea that prurient sex makes murder more interesting has its own disgusting history, naught to do with the truth, that intersects here– I know, she couldn’t write a book on everything!

Well that’s a can of worms – the hardcore feminists of the 1960s famously said that marriage is just prostitution with a ring!

Historians would say that it’s important to understand that companionate marriage (as we call it) is very much a 19th/20th century ideal. Most marriages have been transactional marriages, and many still are – there’s not necessarily anything wrong with that, and it doesn’t preclude seeing marriage as a type of partnership as well. Looking at our presidents, we could say the Obamas appear to have a companionate marriage, the Trumps appear to have a transactional one ;)

I loved it, both Rubenhold's writing style and the information regarding the victims themselves. It was fascinating to learn more of who the women were in truth, versus the perception of them at the time.

You're right. Thanks for the correction.

I agree a little more nuance and repeated acknowledgement that her own hypotheses were based on educated guess work and unreliable sources would have removed some of the controversy and improved the book.

But given the scarcity of reliable information (due to reporter bias and poor record keeping) I think she's done an absolutely astounding job to gather as much biographical information as she did. She turned them from bodies on a mortuary slab to living, breathing women who lived heartbreakingly difficult, troubled and sad lives, and as she described them bedding down in the gutter I found myself desperately wishing that someone could have come along and shaken them awake and moved them on before they could become the Ripper's victim. The book left me angry at their fate, and the fates of thousands of women like them. She brought them back to life. It's not a perfect book, but it's an amazing one nonetheless.

That pretty much sums it up, I think.

If you read the book it literally debunks the assumption that prostitution was a career choice or a chosen job. Lots of Victorian women engaged in transactional sex - but is being coerced or doing it once because you are starving and desperate the same as being a prostitute as an occupation? That's what the book explores.

I said part time.

You've sold me on the book.