22 Quotes by Hallie Rubenhold

At its very core, the story of Jack the Ripper is a narrative of a killer's deep, abiding hatred of women, and our culture's obsession with the mythology serves only to normalize its particular brand of misogyny... In order to keep him alive, we have had to forget his victims. We have become complicit in their diminishment.

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.

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. It is for them that I write this book. I do so in the hope that we may now hear their stories clearly and give back to them that which was so brutally taken away with their lives: their dignity.

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.

At the time of the murders, the belief that “Jack the Ripper was a killer of prostitutes” helped reinforce this moral code. However, while it served an agenda in 1888, this often repeated line fails to serve any immediately obvious purpose today. Nevertheless, it is still the one “fact” about the murders upon which everyone can agree, and yet it does not bear scrutiny.

Grub Street could be a graveyard for ambition, a pit of quicksand that swallowed authors whole, pulling names and the works attached to them into a well of anonymity.

I write for those women who do not speak, for those who do not have a voice because they were so terrified, because we are taught to respect fear more than ourselves. We’ve been taught that silence would save us, but it won’t. – AUDRE LORDE.

In order to gawp at and examine this miracle of malevolence we have figuratively stepped over the bodies of those he murdered, and in some cases, stopped to kick them as we walked past. The larger his profile grows, the more those of his victims seem to fade.

The poor were judged to be lazy and immoral paupers who refused to do honest work and bred bastards and enormous families while “living off handouts.