Top 120 Hallie Rubenhold Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

2. “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.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

3. “If a husband, father, or partner left or died, a working-class woman with dependents would find it almost impossible to survive. The structure of society ensured that a woman without a man was superfluous.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

4. “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.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

5. “They are male, authoritarian, and middle class. They were formed at a time when women had no voice, and few rights, and the poor were considered lazy and degenerate: to have been both of these things was one of the worst possible combinations. For over 130 years we have embraced the dusty parcel we were handed. We have rarely ventured to peer inside it or attempted to remove the thick wrapping that has kept us from knowing these women or their true histories.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

6. “Mary Jane eventually sent Joseph a very clear message that she valued her friendship with ‘gay women’ more than she did her relationship with him.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

7. “They are worth more to us than the empty human shells we have taken them for; they were children who cried for their mothers, they were young women who fell in love; they endured childbirth, the death of parents; they laughed, and they celebrated Christmas. They argued with their siblings, they wept, they dreamed, they hurt, they enjoyed small triumphs. 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.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

8. “It is only by bringing these women back to life that we can silence the Ripper and what he represents. By permitting them to speak, by attempting to understand their experiences and see their humanity, we can restore to them the respect and compassion to which they are entitled. 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.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

9. “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.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

10. “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.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

11. “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.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

12. “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.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

13. “When a woman steps out of line and contravenes the feminine norm, whether on social media or on the Victorian street, there is a tacit understanding that someone must put her back in her place.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

14. “All new inmates were stripped of their clothing and whatever personal belongings they possessed. They were then required to enter a communal bath and scrub themselves in water that had been used by every other person who had gained admission that day. Following this, much like prisoners, inmates were clothed in a functional workhouse uniform, which never truly belonged to them.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

15. “It was a cough hacked into the face of the establishment.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

16. “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.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

17. “If the Whitechapel murders served to expose anything, it was the unspeakably horrendous conditions in which the poor of that district lived.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

18. “It did not matter where she fled – to Wolverhampton or Birmingham, to the household of a pugilist or a tinplate worker. She could expect that this routine would command her life until she married. Then it would be her own mother’s life; the pain of childbearing, the weariness of child rearing, worry, hunger and exhaustion, and eventually, sickness and death.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

19. “While the nineteenth-century double standard enabled men to walk away from such attachments, it often devastated the lives of the women, who were left to bear the crying and gurgling consequences.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

20. “Bare-knuckle boxing had been big business in England since the eighteenth century.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

21. “Unfortunately, in three of the five cases, the official documentation from these inquests is missing.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

22. “Elisabeth Stride, who was found in Dutfield’s Yard, off Berner Street, and Catherine “Kate” Eddowes, who was killed in Mitre Square. After a brief pause in his spree, he committed his final atrocity on November 9: a complete mutilation of the body of Mary Jane Kelly as she lay in her bed at 13 Miller’s Court.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

23. “Poor women’s labor was cheap because poor women were considered expendable and because society did not designate them as a family’s breadwinner. Unfortunately, many of them had to be. If a husband, father, or partner left or died, a working-class woman with dependents would find it almost impossible to survive. The structure of society ensured that a woman without a man was superfluous.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

24. “The cards were stacked against Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Kate and Mary Jane from the day of their births. They began their lives in deficit. Not only were most of them born into working-class families, but they were born female.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

25. “While the experience of homelessness in Victorian London was one of wretched misery for all who were forced to endure it, women like Polly, who found themselves without shelter, might also expect to become victims of sexual violence.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

26. “Mrs. Beeton, in her Book of Household Management, published in 1861, suggested that a maid-of-all-work should receive annual pay of nine to fourteen pounds; if the employer supplied the maid with an allowance to purchase her own tea, sugar, and small beer, this figure was reduced to seven and a half to eleven pounds.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

27. “Jack the Ripper killed prostitutes, or so it has always been believed, but there is no hard evidence to suggest that three of his five victims were prostitutes at all.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

28. “One of the workhouse’s primary functions was to humiliate those who were forced to rely upon it. Regardless of their circumstances, the old, infirm, the sick and abandoned, the able-bodied but unlucky were treated with equal disdain.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

29. “As the pathology of syphilis was not fully understood, it was erroneously believed that the afflicted were not contagious while there were no immediate signs of the disease.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

30. “The fibers that have clung to and defined the shape of Polly, Annie, Elisabeth, Kate, and Mary Jane’s stories are the values of the Victorian world. They are male, authoritarian, and middle class.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

31. “No amount of women’s labor in a factory, a sweatshop, or a laundry, selling items on the street or doing piecework from home, would ever bring in an amount adequate to cover a family’s needs and keep it from the workhouse.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

32. “However, the police were so committed to their theories about the killer’s choice of victims that they failed to conclude the obvious – the Ripper targeted women while they slept.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

33. “After doing some rough calculations, Warren estimated that approximately 1,200 prostitutes inhabited Whitechapel’s 233 common lodging houses. More importantly, he qualified this statement by admitting that the police “have no means of ascertaining what women are prostitutes and who are not.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

34. “In the eyes of society, and the army, Ruth had become a “dolly-mop”: a soldier’s woman. Though such a woman did not quite fall into the category of “professional,” she was deemed a sort of “amateur prostitute.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

35. “January 16, 1864, eighteen-year-old Polly and her beau were married at St. Bride’s, also known as “the Printer’s Church.” William proudly entered that precise profession as his on the register.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

36. “Within laboring communities, the social stigma of time spent at the workhouse was so great that many would rather beg, sleep rough, or become a prostitute than place themselves at the mercy of this institution.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

37. “On November 30, the day that the Chapmans buried their daughter, Annie’s sisters, Emily and Miriam, paid an urgent visit to the Spelthorne Sanatorium, on the outskirts of London.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

38. “As a result, between 1851 and 1891, nearly 43 percent of British women between the ages of fifteen and twenty entered this occupation.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

39. “On every side, and far as the eye could see into the heavy distance, tall chimneys, crowding on each other, and presenting that endless repetition of the same dull, ugly form, which is the horror of oppressive dreams, poured out their plague of smoke, obscured the light, and made foul the melancholy air.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

40. “One of the workhouse’s primary functions was to humiliate those who were forced to rely upon it. Regardless of their circumstances, the old, infirm, the sick and abandoned, the able-bodied but unlucky were treated with equal disdain. If the head of a household lost his income, he and all of his dependents had to join him under the workhouse roof.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

41. “Much as anticipated, three months after the nuptials, Polly was expecting the couple’s first child. On December 17, 1864, the cries of William Edward Walker Nichols filled the rooms of 17 Kirby Street.7 By the autumn of 1865, Mrs. Nichols was pregnant once more, and the need for larger accommodation grew as obvious as her maternal belly.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

42. “Mary Higgs, a minister’s wife who went undercover as a female tramp to study the effects of poverty, was horrified to find that in her ragged dress she was continually verbally assaulted by men.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

43. “A private coachman was employed by a wealthy family as the head or second driver of his master’s or mistress’s vehicles.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

44. “More than 650 died in the tragedy, the greatest loss of life sustained in any Thames shipping disaster.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

45. “By embracing him, we embrace the set of values that surrounded him in 1888 which teaches women that they are of a lesser value and can expect to be dishonoured and abused. We enforce the notion that ‘bad women’ deserve punishment and that ‘prostitutes’ are a sub-species of female. In.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

46. “It was generally accepted by all levels of society, without question, that such women would do anything for food and a bed. Because they were desperate, they were there to be used. In some cases, their permission needn’t even be solicited.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

47. “As social commentators marvelled, charity was ’frequently derived from the lowest orders.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

48. “By embracing him, we embrace the set of values that surrounded him in 1888, which teaches women that they are of a lesser value and can expect to be dishonored and abused.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

49. “Investigations into the Whitechapel murders did, however, explicitly and convincingly expose a disturbing set of facts: the poor of that district lived in unspeakably horrendous conditions. The encampment and riots at Trafalgar Square were a conspicuous manifestation of what had been chronically ailing in the East End and other impoverished parts of London. It was a cough hacked in the face of the establishment. The emergence of Jack the Ripper was a louder and more violent one still.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

50. “Factory workers and craftsmen who once drank porter in the mornings now stopped on their way to work to buy a penny roll and a cup of hot caffeine.”

— Hallie Rubenhold