Home > Work > The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper
21 " It was a cough hacked into the face of the establishment. "
― Hallie Rubenhold , The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper
22 " All new inmates were stripped of their clothing and whatever personal belongings they possessed. They were then required to enter a communal bath and scrub themselves in water that had been used by every other person who had gained admission that day. Following this, much like prisoners, inmates were clothed in a functional workhouse uniform, which never truly belonged to them. "
23 " If a husband, father, or partner left or died, a working-class woman with dependents would find it almost impossible to survive. The structure of society ensured that a woman without a man was superfluous. "
24 " While the nineteenth-century double standard enabled men to walk away from such attachments, it often devastated the lives of the women, who were left to bear the crying and gurgling consequences. "
25 " It did not matter where she fled—to Wolverhampton or Birmingham, to the household of a pugilist or a tinplate worker. She could expect that this routine would command her life until she married. Then it would be her own mother’s life; the pain of childbearing, the weariness of child rearing, worry, hunger and exhaustion, and eventually, sickness and death. "
26 " By embracing him, we embrace the set of values that surrounded him in 1888 which teaches women that they are of a lesser value and can expect to be dishonoured and abused. We enforce the notion that ‘bad women’ deserve punishment and that ‘prostitutes’ are a sub-species of female. In "
27 " They are worth more to us than the empty human shells we have taken them for; they were children who cried for their mothers, they were young women who fell in love; they endured childbirth, the death of parents; they laughed, and they celebrated Christmas. They argued with their siblings, they wept, they dreamed, they hurt, they enjoyed small triumphs. The courses their lives took mirrored that of so many other women of the Victorian age, and yet were so singular in the way they ended. "
28 " the Police are [not] justified in calling any woman a common prostitute, unless she so describes herself, or has been convicted as such "
29 " Factory workers and craftsmen who once drank porter in the mornings now stopped on their way to work to buy a penny roll and a cup of hot caffeine. "
30 " In the evenings these places become reading rooms,” wrote one observer. “They are convenient to thousands of persons who have not the comforts of domesticity at home. The good fire, the bright light, the supply of newspapers and magazines, and the cup of simple beverage, are obtainable for a few pence "
31 " At its very core, the story of Jack the Ripper is a narrative of a killer’s deep, abiding hatred of women, and our cultural obsession with the mythology only serves to normalize its particular brand of misogyny "
32 " From all accounts, the coachman’s wife did not make for an ugly drunk, but rather a sad, sullen, quiet one, weighed down by heartache. "
33 " On November 30, the day that the Chapmans buried their daughter, Annie’s sisters, Emily and Miriam, paid an urgent visit to the Spelthorne Sanatorium, on the outskirts of London. "
34 " Mary Jane may have been skilled at presenting a sweet façade, but her internal life was one of turmoil and distress. "
35 " The victims of Jack the Ripper were never ‘just prostitutes’; they were daughters, wives, mothers, sisters and lovers. They were women. They were human beings, and surely that, in itself, is enough. "
36 " Patients were admitted to these “retreats” either voluntarily or “upon the application of their friends” and were required to spend at least a month, "
37 " According to the writer Jerome K. Jerome, who lived there as a child in the 1860s, it was a place of contrasts, where “town and country struggled for supremacy,” where the surrounding marshes were still dotted with farms, and where herds of goats and cows might be driven through the streets. "
38 " Her name isn’t recorded among the occasional troublemakers, "
39 " While the coffeehouse may have had its dedicated adherents, a business could rise or fall based on its location: too many pubs and too few teetotalers nearby could close the shutters of even the most welcoming coffee room. "
40 " Annie was permitted visitors as well. On December 30, shortly after she arrived at the sanatorium, the logbook recorded that “Mrs Chapman’s husband called to see her.” John, who must have worried incessantly about his wife, had begged leave from his obligations to the Barrys during the height of the Christmas social calendar to ensure that she had settled in well. It was he who was paying the expense of her treatment, at a cost of twelve pence per week. "