A new front in the history wars? Responding to Rubenhold’s feminist revision of the Ripper
| Author | Paul Bleakley |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1748895821992460 |
| Published date | 01 November 2022 |
| Date | 01 November 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1748895821992460
Criminology & Criminal Justice
2022, Vol. 22(5) 659 –675
© The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/1748895821992460
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A new front in the history
wars? Responding to
Rubenhold’s feminist revision
of the Ripper
Paul Bleakley
Middlesex University, UK
Abstract
Hallie Rubenhold’s The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed By Jack the Ripper has drawn
the criticism of the community of amateur sleuths dubbed ‘Ripperologists’ for its revisionist
perspective, which claims that the canonical five victims of Jack the Ripper were not all sex
workers. Rubenhold’s victim-centred approach has opened a new front in the history wars, as
Ripperologists accuse her of historical denialism in pursuit of a feminist agenda. This article assesses
Rubenhold’s methods, and her contribution to historical criminology, as well as considering why
dominant historical narratives of crime prove so resistant to reinterpretation.
Keywords
Historical criminology, history wars, Jack the Ripper, methodology, revisionism
Introduction
The late nineteenth century was a time of constant fear for the destitute women of
London’s East End. These women were forced to contend with the conditions of endemic
poverty that characterised the East End in the Victorian era, a period when mass migra-
tion triggered by the industrial revolution had resulted in the formation of densely popu-
lated slums where crime was rife (Beames, 1852). It was in this environment that the
‘Autumn of Terror’ occurred – a period from August to November 1888 when a serial
murderer dubbed ‘Jack the Ripper’ killed at least five women in the Whitechapel district
(Gray, 2018). The Ripper murders were never definitively solved by the Metropolitan
Corresponding author:
Paul Bleakley, Middlesex University, The Burroughs, Hendon, London NW4 4BT, UK.
Email: pj.bleakley@gmail.com
992460CRJ0010.1177/1748895821992460Criminology & Criminal JusticeBleakley
research-article2021
Article
660 Criminology & Criminal Justice 22(5)
Police, contributing to the mythologising of the case that has taken place in the interven-
ing years. More than other unsolved historical mysteries, the Ripper case has captured
the attention of amateur sleuths – ‘Ripperologists’ – who have turned research on Jack
the Ripper into a life’s work, and (in some ways) a distinct branch of historical
criminology.
Ripperology’s traditional focus has been speculating on the identity of the Ripper, and
the motives that drove the murder spree. Most of this theorising derives from the analysis
of an incomplete or otherwise unreliable historical record, and yet the community of
Ripperologists have developed normative standards for the field that guide what research
is considered valuable and what is not. It is into this fray that British-American historian
Hallie Rubenhold stepped with her 2019 book The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women
Killed by Jack the Ripper. Rubenhold, best known for her work on Georgian era prostitu-
tion, courted controversy with this foray into Ripperology which dramatically reframes
the context of the Ripper murders. Rubenhold’s central purpose in The Five is to tell the
story of the canonical five victims of the Ripper – a feminist victimological perspective
that is not a traditional focus of Ripperology. The main contribution of her research
comes from her exploration of the victims’ lives before coming to the East End, which
Rubenhold contends shows that (contrary to popular opinion) several of the women
killed during the Autumn of Terror were not sex workers (Rubenhold, 2019). Instead,
Rubenhold argues that it is highly probable that the canonical five were rough sleeping
at the time they were killed, and were victims of opportunity rather than ‘risky lifestyle
choices’ (Rubenhold, 2019; Turanovic et al., 2015). Rubenhold’s contention puts a dra-
matic new spin on our understanding of the Ripper murders, and essentially calls into
question over a century’s worth of assumptions made by Ripperologists.
The purpose of this article is to understand the resistance of conventional Ripperology
to accept, or even engage with, Rubenhold’s research. Rubenhold has been treated as an
interloper in the field of Ripperology. Her research methodology has been derided as
ineffective, and her contentions that the canonical five were sleeping rather than solicit-
ing at the time they were killed has been met with scorn (Gray, 2019). Effectively,
Rubenhold’s feminist approach to the Ripper murders has opened a new front of the his-
tory wars between traditionalist Ripperologists and those open to a revisionist interpreta-
tion of the historical narrative. Examining the theoretical causes of the hostile outbreak
of a history war in the Ripper case has major implications for historical criminologists. It
assists in understanding the problematic territory that researchers enter into when revisit-
ing established narratives, and the potential resistance that comes when applying new
theoretical perspectives to explain historical crime.
Methodology
In assessing Rubenhold’s research (and the public response to it), this study reviews The
Five through the prism of both historical and public criminology. While largely narrative
in its style, Rubenhold’s The Five engages with the natural preference for temporal con-
tinuity that historical criminology inherently champions. In his early arguments for a
revised approach to historical crime studies, David Churchill (2019) critiques traditional
‘stadial frameworks’ that work to divide history into rigid chronological epochs that can
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