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A review by owlette
The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper by Hallie Rubenhold
5.0
One of my favorite nonfiction I read this year.
You don’t need any prior interest in, let alone knowledge of, Victorian London or Jack the Ripper case to get into the book. Rubenhold is a skillful researcher and weaves together a compellingly vivid account of these women from disparate primary and secondary sources. Honestly, I was amazed by how much detail she's uncovered in her research; it's an impressive historiographical work. Since her agenda is to put the spotlight on the victims, she rarely mentions Jack the Ripper in the book. Even at their deaths, each woman’s account ends with her going to sleep for the last time and there's no morbid speculation on Jack the Ripper's modus operandi.
Speaking of Jack the Ripper's method, something I didn’t know before reading the book is that all the victims were killed while they were asleep. And all except for the fifth victim were sleeping on the street the night they died. This fact is introduced early on in the book; when I read it, it reminded me of what criminologist David Wilson said in this video: “Many serial killers are beta males trying to be alphas. … [The] serial killer, far from being a super predator, is often just simply a loser.” And that assessment resonates even more strongly as you read the rest of the book. Society had killed them before Jack the Ripper did: he merely drew the blood.
The heartbreaking thing for me was how eerily similar the trajectories of Annie and Polly’s lives were to the accounts of single mothers and divorced women in Tokyo today (cf. [b:東京貧困女子。: 彼女たちはなぜ躓いたのか|48751632|東京貧困女子。 彼女たちはなぜ躓いたのか|中村淳彦|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1573465205l/48751632._SX50_.jpg|92893182]). Just as in Victorian England, so too in modern Japan patriarchal misogyny is enforced through welfare policies that preclude single and divorced women from enjoying privileges granted to married women (cf. [b:Welfare and Capitalism in Postwar Japan|5996251|Welfare and Capitalism in Postwar Japan|Margarita Estevez-Abe|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1347692209l/5996251._SX50_.jpg|6170532]). Both then and now, women’s livelihoods can easily become undone by one misstep outside of the expected norm. The social fabric woven by the patriarchal agenda will always leave a hole for women to fall through. Rubenhold reminds us that we blind ourselves to this truth by forgetting the downtrodden and glamorizing the killer.
You don’t need any prior interest in, let alone knowledge of, Victorian London or Jack the Ripper case to get into the book. Rubenhold is a skillful researcher and weaves together a compellingly vivid account of these women from disparate primary and secondary sources. Honestly, I was amazed by how much detail she's uncovered in her research; it's an impressive historiographical work. Since her agenda is to put the spotlight on the victims, she rarely mentions Jack the Ripper in the book. Even at their deaths, each woman’s account ends with her going to sleep for the last time and there's no morbid speculation on Jack the Ripper's modus operandi.
Speaking of Jack the Ripper's method, something I didn’t know before reading the book is that all the victims were killed while they were asleep. And all except for the fifth victim were sleeping on the street the night they died. This fact is introduced early on in the book; when I read it, it reminded me of what criminologist David Wilson said in this video: “Many serial killers are beta males trying to be alphas. … [The] serial killer, far from being a super predator, is often just simply a loser.” And that assessment resonates even more strongly as you read the rest of the book. Society had killed them before Jack the Ripper did: he merely drew the blood.
The heartbreaking thing for me was how eerily similar the trajectories of Annie and Polly’s lives were to the accounts of single mothers and divorced women in Tokyo today (cf. [b:東京貧困女子。: 彼女たちはなぜ躓いたのか|48751632|東京貧困女子。 彼女たちはなぜ躓いたのか|中村淳彦|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1573465205l/48751632._SX50_.jpg|92893182]). Just as in Victorian England, so too in modern Japan patriarchal misogyny is enforced through welfare policies that preclude single and divorced women from enjoying privileges granted to married women (cf. [b:Welfare and Capitalism in Postwar Japan|5996251|Welfare and Capitalism in Postwar Japan|Margarita Estevez-Abe|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1347692209l/5996251._SX50_.jpg|6170532]). Both then and now, women’s livelihoods can easily become undone by one misstep outside of the expected norm. The social fabric woven by the patriarchal agenda will always leave a hole for women to fall through. Rubenhold reminds us that we blind ourselves to this truth by forgetting the downtrodden and glamorizing the killer.