生而为女 – The Five by Hallie Rubenhold

“不过是妓女”，一直以来，媒体热衷于告诉人们，被“开膛手杰克”杀害的人都是妓女，且在这起连环杀人案件中，杀手成了被着力讲述的对象，甚至一度成了人们追捧的对象。而受害的女性不仅被媒体和大众忽略，更是被歪曲。

通过搜罗大量的历史档案、庭审材料、证人证词，结合当时的时代背景，哈莉·鲁本霍德为读者还原了5位受害女性丰满而悲苦的一生。被“开膛手杰克”杀害的绝非都是妓女，“她们是女儿、妻子、母亲、姐妹和爱人”，更重要的是，“她们是人”。她们之所以被杀害，并非因为不检点、道德有污，而是因为她们在错误的时间出现在错误的地方。她们最大的不幸，可能是生而为女。

Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine, and Mary-Jane are famous for the same thing, though they never met. They came from Fleet Street, Knightsbridge, Wolverhampton, Sweden, and Wales. They wrote ballads, ran coffee houses, lived on country estates; they breathed ink-dust from printing presses and escaped people-traffickers.

What they had in common was the year of their murders: 1888. The person responsible was never identified, but the character created by the press to fill that gap has become far more famous than any of these five women.

For more than a century, newspapers have been keen to tell us that “the Ripper” preyed on prostitutes. Not only is this untrue, as historian Hallie Rubenhold has discovered, but it has prevented the real stories of these fascinating women from being told. Now, in this devastating narrative of five lives, Rubenhold finally sets the record straight, revealing a world not just of Dickens and Queen Victoria, but of poverty, homelessness, and rampant misogyny. They died because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time – but their greatest misfortune was to be born a woman.

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