Five Women, Victims of Circumstance

In this book, the author gives a history of the times that these women lived, which sheds light on the circumstances that led them to be at the location to be victim to a killer. The author reports on the living conditions of the Victorian era when these women were murdered – the poverty, families and individuals living in squalor, renting cramped, dilapidated rooms at high rents and those that couldn’t afford renting, sleeping on the streets. Rubenold describes the environment and condition of the workhouses where people would go when unemployed. Workhouses were also where single and pregnant women, and women with children would go with no means of support, having lost or left their husbands.

She describes the social setting of the time for women. Women were expected to be raised and were trained to support the family, by raising children and doing housework. So, a woman’s main occupation was wife or domestic help. Women carried the sole burden of holding the family together. A man could stray, be an adulterer, even leave and return and no blemish would fall on him, ultimately, it would be the woman’s fault for somehow failing to keep the relationship together. A woman separated from her husband was considered a failed, fallen woman and not employable, would end up in the workhouses or the streets. Women on the streets were considered outcast and there was no distinction between the homeless and a prostitute. Women on the streets were all tagged by law enforcement as no better than prostitutes, even though the homeless population at the time was around 70,000, the author notes that police investigations did not take this into account – these people were simply an invisible population.

The author divides the book into five parts, one for each victim, from birth to adulthood. Reading from one woman’s story to the next, you see the similarities in their lives that led them to their tragic ends. It seems each woman was already victim to the circumstances of their birth. Each were born into poor, working class families and suffered loss very young, which was the norm due to poverty and unsanitary living conditions. They had access to a limited education, because they were expected to either enter domestic service or marry. Because of these poor living conditions and absence of family planning, they lost parents and young siblings within short spans of time, leaving them to either support themselves or become homemaker for the rest of the family. Each of these women started drinking young and, in time, developed a drinking problem, possibly to dull their feelings of drastic loss and the situations they were in. The first four victims had marriages that failed due mostly to their drinking and from there, they were on a downward spiral where drinking was all they had left.

Hallie Rubenhold gives an extensive, detailed, account of these five women, bringing the social history of the time and their lives together to make sense of the reasons they were on the streets the nights they were murdered. It was really an eye-opening read. Before these women were victims of Jack the Ripper, they were all victims of circumstance and the rigid, unforgiving rules that women were expected to live by at the time. Because they couldn’t live up to what was expected of them by society, they were judged and cast aside by their respectable neighbors and Victorian authorities, long before they were murdered. By doing this research and writing this book, the author gives these women a narrative and a place in history alongside, their killer, whose been standing alone, larger-than-life for too long.