57 pages • 1 hour read
Hallie RubenholdThe Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper
Nonfiction | Biography | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Literary Context: Microhistory
The Five belongs to a specific sub-genre of historical nonfiction known as “microhistory.” A microhistory focuses on a specific event or individual in history who is not considered a major political, cultural, or intellectual figure. Microhistories thus often focus on “history from below,” representing traditionally marginalized groups such as women, racial minorities, the working class, or the poor. Microhistories seek to illuminate elements and trends in a given time period from new and overlooked angles. An example of such a microhistory would be one that examines the life of the daughter of an artisan in Tudor England, instead of a biography of Queen Elizabeth I.
Some notable examples of microhistory include Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812, Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, Judith M. Bennett’s A Medieval Life: Cecilia Penifader and the World of English Peasants Before the Plague, and Jonathan D. Spence’s The Death of Woman Wang. The Five is something of an unusual example, as Jack the Ripper’s victims are far from unknown. However, Rubenhold makes the case that the actual lives of the “canonical” five victims of Jack the Ripper have been completely ignored by historians, as their lives have been overshadowed by the lurid details of their murders. Rubenhold also uses the biographies of the five women to examine broader topics involving social, cultural, and gender history.
Historical Context: Victorian Attitudes Toward Women
Victorian views about women were built on ideas that had been dominant in Britain for over 1,000 years. Christianity taught that the first woman, Eve, had introduced sin and death into the world by convincing the first man Adam to defy God. Traditionally, women were seen as morally, intellectually, and physically weaker than men. They were excluded from many professions and could not earn degrees from universities. The law tended to treat women as dependents of their husbands or male relations, and usually excluded them from positions of power and leadership. Many marriages among the upper classes were arranged by the women’s families.
As Britain’s industrialized economy and colonial empire grew during the Victorian era, the middle class became larger and more conscious of itself as a group with a distinct social identity. While working-class women continued to work in agriculture, family businesses, factories, domestic service, or artisanal work, middle-class women became more confined to the domestic sphere. Middle-class English society began to idealize what it called “the angel of the house”: A woman expected to devote herself entirely to the home and the comfort of her family. Such middle-class values were reinforced by the increasing number of professionals in medicine and the social sciences, who often presented the middle-class morality of the Victorian era as something logical and “natural.”
Victorian social norms and attitudes surrounding sexuality also strictly diverged along gendered lines. While men were often expected to have sexual experiences outside of marriage, women were expected to remain “pure” and inexperienced until marriage, and after marriage to remain faithful to their husbands. Women who had sex outside of marriage or left their husbands were often regarded as “fallen” women, while attitudes toward sex workers tended to be either paternalistic and patronizing, or strongly condemnatory. The women featured in The Five thus often faced barriers and social ostracism due to the double standards surrounding out-of-wedlock pregnancies, marital breakdown, nonmarital relationships, and sex work. In The Five, Rubenhold seeks to complicate the traditional view of Jack the Ripper’s victims by depicting the five women as worthy of respect and acknowledgment in their own right.
Critical Context: True Crime
The Five has been praised by critics for its feminist approach in shifting the historical focus from Jack the Ripper and the mystery surrounding his identity to the lives of the victims. While Washington Post critic Wendy Smith suggests that Hallie Rubenhold is “overstating” the claim that society has turned Jack the Ripper into a celebrity, she adds that Rubenhold “has a point about the legions of books that speculate endlessly about Jack the Ripper’s identity while displaying scant interest in the five human beings he viciously dispatched” (Smith, Wendy. “Jack the Ripper's Identity Has Been Endlessly Scrutinized. His Victims Were Largely Forgotten.” The Washington Post, 2019).
Critics have also pointed out that The Five can be seen as a critique of true crime, a genre that has become increasingly popular in recent years in the form of books, articles, television documentaries, and podcasts. Like Rubenhold in The Five, critics of true crime have accused many creators and publishers of engaging in sensationalism and speculation that can turn crimes into forms of lurid entertainment instead of serious analysis or investigation. True crime has also been criticized for focusing on the violence and the mystery of the crimes themselves rather than on the tragedy of the victims’ deaths. In The Five, Rubenhold offers an alternative approach, one that focuses on exploring the lives of the women instead of regarding them only as murder victims.
