Hallie Rubenhold’s The Five sheds light on the lives of the 5 women who were murdered by Jack the Ripper in London in 1888. So much of history has focused on these women’s final hours, their deaths, the macabre nature of their wounds, and the assumption that they were all bad women who put themselves in harm’s way. In other words, since they were seen as fallen women, they were in essence blamed for their own murders.Sonja and Vanessa offer a brief bio of each woman, and an overview of Rubenhold’s carefully reasoned and meticulously-researched argument for seeing these women as 3 dimensional people who deserve to be remembered and their loss mourned. And while no one would claim that Victorian England was a fair playing field, we’ll explain how Rubenhold’s research reveals how Victorian society was astonishingly stacked against women, specifically.Along the way, there are honestly not a lot of bright spots, but a “jolly bonnet” and an unlikely tattoo can be made out under the gas lamp lights of this grim historical time and place for women. REFERENCES:Please, please, please treat yourself to reading Hallie Rubenhold's The Five. She writes a compelling narrative for each woman, and you’ll come away with a breathtakingly detailed impression of the complicated world these women were doing their best to survive. The writing is fresh, and the amount of literal digging Rubenhold must have done to get past all the false narratives to actual truth is stunning. It’s historical narrative at its best, and the final chapter is an impassioned, moving assessment of how laws, religion, social mores, journalists, and historians have all failed these women. The Five is a tour de force, and we could not recommend it more highly.

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