Hallie Rubenhold

And it's quite complex to try to explain the...

you know, the moral context of another century.

But, you know, a broken woman and a fallen woman and a woman who had had sex out of marriage and a woman who was no longer

part of what the Victorian imagination would think of as an acceptable woman.

So a woman who was a mother, a woman who was a caregiver, a woman who was part of a family, who was sweet, who was demure.

You know, these two things.

If a woman failed at one, she had kind of failed at the other.

And so these women, the five women, were living on the street.

They were homeless.

They were dispossessed.

They were alcoholics.

And so the Victorian mindset conflates these women as, you know, just this one package of moral damage.

And so it's very easy to make that leap and say a woman is a prostitute if she's on the street at night and not think of all the other reasons why she would be, such as she was homeless.

Well, I really wanted to breathe life back into these women.

I wanted their stories to be told again.

And I wanted us to really take them out of the shadows and see them as human beings.

Because, you know, they have been trammeled by this obsession with the Ripper and what comes out of this obsession with the Ripper, which is the whole Ripper industry as well, which is

For example, if you come to London, there are umpteen different tours you can go on that take you through East London, take you through white chapels and spittle fields.

And you can see all the places where these women died.

And you can go to the Ripper Museum, you know, where there are kind of figures of the women lying dead.