On the portrayal of these women, she says: In her blog post on entertainment’s violent (male) gaze, adult entertainer Oaxa Koate examines the way we use the lives and deaths of women involved in sex work as plot devices, describing depictions of violence against sex workers in the media as “an epidemic”. Part of our cultural fascination with the Ripper is precisely because the women he murdered were, or were thought to be, prostitutes. It adds that little bit of voyeuristic excitement and legtimises our interest in the sexual element that is overlaid on the murders. It’s significant that when it comes to the Ripper, contemporary discussions tend to treat the lives of the victims as clues to the identity, as though they were nothing more than evidence. The Jack the Ripper display in the London Dungeons Melanie Clegg, a self-described Ripperologist, also focuses her attention (and her upcoming novel) on the women rather than the Ripper – her excellent post about Mary Ann Nichols looks at the addiction and homelessness that led Nichols to sex work. Fern Riddell of the wonderful Vice and Virtue decided to combat the erasure of Mary Ann’s identity on Twitter by tweeting about Mary Ann’s life, including the route that led her into the Ripper’s path. Luckily, there are a few fantastic feminist historians dedicated to turning the debate towards his victims. On the other, whilst we don’t know the identity of the serial killer who stalked Whitechapel in 1888, we do know that he was a sadistic misogynist who preyed on some of society’s most vulnerable women and so building up a tourist trail around the scene of his crimes feels more than a little unpleasant.Īlthough everyone has heard of Jack the Ripper, few could identify the woman he killed by name.
I’ve always had mixed feelings on the cult that’s built up around the Ripper murders – one the one hand, I love an unsolved gaslit murder as much as the next recovering goth writing historical crime. Today is the 125th anniversary of the death of Mary Ann Nichols, the first victim officially attributed to Jack the Ripper and, since this blog is intended to look at the grisly and macabre side of the Victorian era with a healthy dollop of feminism, today seems as good a place to start blogging as any.
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