An excellent book that I can’t recommend highly enough.
Rubenhold encourages us to look past the sensationalism of Jack the Ripper to the desperately hard lives (and horrific deaths) of the women he slaughtered. These were ordinary women with regrettably common problems (poverty, addiction, unstable relationships) in a time when there was no social safety net or chance at independence and self-reliance for women.
It’s infuriating that these women were immediately written off as “just prostitutes” and have continued to be in the almost century-and-a-half since by writers and so-called experts and (ugh) Ripper tour guides — most of whom are happy to lazily spout the same old tripe about the women before getting to what they consider to be the really good stuff: gushing over a murderous psychopath revered for his ability to escape detection. How screwed up is that?
Read it.