Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Serial Killers & Misogyny

Episode Date: October 11, 2022

What is it with our culture’s fascination with serial killers? Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Peter Sutclifffe, Jack the Ripper….these violent people are as well known as our national treasures, but we only know them for their horrific crimes.What role does misogyny play in how these serial killers are portrayed on our screens and in our newspapers? And how does it affect court cases? Today Kate is joined by historian Hallie Rubenhold, who wrote the bestselling book The Five, which looked into the lives of Jack the Ripper’s victims, and highlighted the sexism in our society’s obsession with the case.The new series of Hallie's podcast, Bad Women, investigates the lives of the victims of the Blackout Ripper, a serial killer who hunted down women during the Blitz of World War Two.*WARNING there are naughty words and adult themes in this episode*Senior Producer: Charlotte Long. Producer: Sophie Gee. Edited and mixed by Anisha Deva.For more History Hit content, subscribe to our newsletters here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts, and audiobooks at History Hit - enter promo code BETWIXTTHESHEETS for a free trial, plus 50% off your first three months' subscription. To download, go to Android or Apple store.For your chance to win 5 Historical Non-Fiction Books (including a signed copy of Dan Snow's On This Day in History), please fill out this short survey. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, my lovely betwixters. This is Kate Lister, and I'm jumping in with actually quite a serious fair-doos warning today because we're talking about serial killers and about the misogyny that underpins the reporting of so many serial killer cases,

and this is inevitably going to mean that we're talking about murder and violence and cruelty, and there's a lot that's going to be covered in this one that's pretty sensitive stuff. So if you just don't want to listen to that today, absolutely no problem. There's plenty to be getting on within the back catalogue, and I'll see you next time. What is it with our society's fascination with serial killers?

And I count myself amongst those obsessed with true crime. Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Peter Sutcliffe, Jack the Ripper, ultimately, these aren't interesting people. They're violent murderers who treated innocent people horrendously and ended their lives. And yet the names of these killers are as recognized as some of our national treasures. it's bizarre, isn't it? But what role does misogyny play in how serial killers are portrayed

on our screens and in our newspapers? How does how we view the women involved affect the court cases? Today, we're going Betwixt the Sheets to Find Out. So there, I'm Kate Lister and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets, The History of Sex Scandal and Society. Netflix have announced record ratings

for their drama about the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, which was watched collectively for around 190, million hours in its first full week. That's a lot of us sitting down to watch this stuff. And that made it number one in 60 countries around the world. And that's just the latest TV show and a long list of popular and gory TV shows,

podcasts, books on true crime. Well, today I'm joined by Hallie Rubenhold, author of the award-winning book The Five, where she researched the lives of the victims of the victims of the crime. serial killer known as Jack the Ripper, and highlighted the sexism at work in our culture's obsession with this case. There's also an adjoining podcast about her research called Bad Women, and it's back today with a brand new series, and she's looking at the criminal that's come to be known as the Blackout Ripper, a man who killed women during the Blitz of World War II. Hally and I talk about misogyny and stigma in serial killer cases, and how women's lives are valued differently, depending

on how they earn their money, where they like to spend their downtime, what they wear, etc, etc. There's a lot to think about and I hope you find our chat interesting. Hey, Ruben Holt, thank you so much to joining me Betwixt the Sheets. Oh, well, it's so wonderful to be on with you. My friends, Kate, we get to have a nice natter that's recorded for the whole world to hear. Oh, I'm so excited to talk to you about this because we've met before and we've done some radio before and we've been Twitter friends for a while. And like when you wrote The Five about the victims of Jack the Ripper,

did you have any idea that it was going to be the absolute insane smash that it was going be? Did you have an inkling? No, no, I had no idea. Well, I mean, I knew it was likely to certainly be a popular book, given its subject matter. Obviously, I'm absolutely delighted that it took off in the way that it did and that it's had the impact that it's had. Oh, God, yeah?

Yeah, it's just been incredible. Genuinely, I'm thrilled. You know, when you're a writer, you know, you spend a lot of time, especially as a historian, and you spend a lot of time looking at things in the past. And, you know, a lot of people are always asking a question, oh, what's relevant about history and how can it change things? And this goes to show that history does have an impact on the present. And history does have a way of illuminating problems today

and making us think in different ways about it. And certainly, as a public historian, that's what I want to do. you know, that's why I get up in the morning. And so the fact that this is doing that and changing things and changing the narrative is really quite amazing. If anyone's listening who hasn't read Halley's book or isn't aware of it, it's basically a biography of what we can call the canonical five victims of the serial killer, known as Jack the Ripper. Only you're not interested in really how these women met their death as in like the gruesome gris. You're not interested in the killer. So the biography is from as much as you can get back in their past to when their lives ended.

and he's not in it. He doesn't feature in it. I mean, that's the whole point. I mean, it's really quite astonishing that for over 130 years, our focus has been on a serial killer whose name we don't know, who we know absolutely nothing about, at the expense of the five people he killed,

who we do know actually quite a lot about. And the whole angle on this has been like a murder mystery, like, who is Jack the Ripper? why did he do what he did? And then these women just become like pieces in a puzzle. It's like a parlor game. They've never really had identities of their own. And in writing the book, what I wanted to do

was to give them back their identities, to restore them effectively to the record, and for us to know them as women and not just parts of the Jack the Ripper mystery. We do this every once in a while with any kind of research, is that someone sort of hits pause on something and goes, guys, what the hell have we been doing?

And then everyone kind of goes, shit, yeah, that's really bad. Like, a really recent example is, like, when you go back and you're watching an old episode of Friends, and now you're just kind of like watching it with 20-22 vision and you're like, you would never be able to get away with saying this stuff. But I think your book kind of had that moment of pointing out something really obvious. Like, why don't we know about these women?

Or why hasn't there been a focus on them? Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. I think that, you know again this is something we really really have to think about how we tell murder stories because the way in which we're always focusing on a true crime story a murder story it's always killer centric it's murderousentric and the more gory the better often and generally it's a his story okay so we focus on his perspective and often he is a killer of women we suppress the whole female angle of this. So we can raise up this very interesting male, the male brain,

you know, the killer's brain, why did he do what he did, you know, what is this telling us about him and his ego? And we're not actually really focusing on the fact that actually this person is not the most important person in all of this. A murder story is about kind of everything in the round. It's about how do we let this happen as a society, whether in the past, whether in the present, how did society create the victim as much as the society created their killer? We're all to blame. We're all culpable, past and present. And we need to turn the mirror around onto ourselves and to also look at other angles of true crime and true crime stories. So it's not always murderer-centric. True crime is still a huge popular genre. And I confess to enjoying a bit of

true crime myself. But since I've read your book, since I've become more conscious of the fact that these aren't fairy stories. These are like real people. I do occasionally like reflect on it. I'm just a bit too much. But even I with that conscious thought in my head of like this is a bit gory, I'm lying there relaxing about to go to bed watching a documentary about somebody being disemboweled. I don't know what that says about me. But like why are we so fascinated with it? What is it? Because it's huge. All Netflix blockbusters are true crime. What is it that we keep returning to these stories? Because they're awful stories.

Yeah, they are awful. I think as humanity, we're really interested in the dark side as well. And I think there's something really basic in the response, which is there's a human need to understand and identify what the threat is in order to avoid it. That's interesting. And I think there's a lot of that going on. And I think that's why we're drawn to it because we're looking for, you know, any signs that one of these people may be entering our lives, maybe in our lives. And I also think

you're also learning how do I avoid becoming a victim as well? What mistakes? This is where a lot of our conditioning comes in about this idea that victims are somehow to blame. And that murders are extraordinary. That murders are extraordinary is what did these women do? What mistakes did they make to put them in the path of a killer. And the fact that we're even conditioned to go down that road, I think is quite telling. Without even realising we're doing it. Yeah. I've researched the history of sex work. And obviously the history of Jack the Ripper is also the history of sex work, or at least that's the popular narrative around it. Your work has disturbed that somewhat. It becomes doubly effacing when you're dealing with a woman who is associated with sex and then meets a violent end, because those

Women are doubly written out of the narrative because they're just quote, quote, prostitutes. Just prostitutes. One of the chapters in my book is called Just Prostitutes because that's what I had heard, said, what I had read about them. Oh, weren't they just prostitutes? Just, that word just. Wow. You know, it's as if sex workers were, are a separate species of woman. that is extraordinary, you know, to actually even consider how we ever got to a place where that thought is comfortable.

It's part of this concept of the less dead, you know, this idea that some people are more dead than others. Some people in society are more valued than other people. So, for example, if the pretty 18-year-old white university student. Virginal. Virginal. University student is killed. Oh my God, there's hue and cry because, you know, this innocent girl, good girl, was murdered.

On the other hand, if a woman who's been working as a sex worker who is addicted to drugs was in and out of prison, she goes missing and she's dead. It's like, oh, well, what did you expect? It's like she brought it on herself. And that woman is considered less dead. because she's not considered as much of the value to society as this pretty white university student is.

It still shocks me to see that narrative in effect because I'd love to be able to say that this has been consigned to the historical dustbin, but it hasn't. Sex workers are still subject to high levels of violence, and when they're written about, it's often prefaced with this word prostitute, prostitute killer, someone killed. And it's like, ask yourself, would that article have been written with the headline

of however this person earned their money? if it was anyone else. When we're talking about your book on the five, tell me a little bit about what your research turned up, because it's this particular narrative, isn't it, is that they were prostitutes and all the cultural baggage and stigma that comes with that word. You researched that. Tell me what you found out about it and tell me about the resistance that you met to that. Yeah, that's the flip side to it. I mean, you really, really have to unpack Victorian attitudes. And this word prostitute, which is such a fascinating word historically, because it's so loaded, it's so pregnant with meaning and interpretation and emotion.

And bearing in mind that really any woman who breached the conventions of what was acceptable womanhood at the time, well, any woman who had sex outside of marriage was a whore and a whore is a prostitute. And these two words were interchangeable. And, you know, she was damaged good. She was a fallen woman. But the other interesting thing is, Victorians were very generalized, very broad in their definition of damaged womanhood, of broken womanhood. I would be extremely damaged by Victorian standards consigned to the dustbin. We all would be. And I kind of love that. I do have these weird moments. I'm at the gym and, you know, all the music videos are playing, all these women.

And I'm thinking, what would somebody from like the 18th or 19th century think of our modern era if they see... Don't think we were nude, wouldn't they? They would think it was just a non-stop orgy in 21st century. And everybody was depraved, and this was, you know, Gomorra. By contrast, their views were so black and white of what womanhood was. So if you transgress the norms, if you were a woman who didn't live, in a stable home. If you didn't have a father figure, a husband, some male family member looking after you, you were kind of suspect. You know, a single woman was suspect at that time,

but a single woman who was homeless, a single woman who also was addicted to alcohol might have mental health problems, any one of those types of women were considered broken women. And broken women were considered to be morally defective and morally damaged. And so, the broken woman and the fallen woman were conflated in the Victorian mind. Your morality is damaged, you will do anything. So if you're living on the streets, if you're begging, if you're an alcoholic, you're a whore as well. You know, because you're a damaged, broken, fallen woman. There was no real investigation that went on to investigate how these women who lived on the streets actually lived their lives. And yes, some were engaged in sex work, but some weren't engaged in sex work. But some weren't

engaged in sex work. And for us to broadly say, oh, they were all prostitutes, because the Victorian police said they were all prostitutes. You know, the Victorian police were carrying all the judgments of their era. The Victorian police were not always right. You know, in fact, Elizabeth Cass case, which happened shortly before the Ripper murders, where, you know, Elizabeth Cass, who was a seamstress, was mistaken as being a streetwalker. And then the police code had, had to be changed about how sex workers were arrested and how they were identified. In fact, at one point, a sex worker couldn't be called a prostitute unless she's self-identified as one. And that's amazing. So this idea, who was and wasn't a prostitute, it was largely

kind of an arbitrary label. And if we just accept whatever the Victorian said about women who were down on their luck, we're taking in all of that morality into the present era and we're judging again. We're doubling down on that judgment of those women. That was part of the thesis of my book. I mean, that's just one aspect of it. That's the bit that a lot of people like to jump on. But, you know, the other thing was I wanted to tell these women's stories. Now, the second part of your question was about the response to this. And there were a lot of people who, who were furious. At the suggestion, not all of them had been selling sex at the time of death.

Yeah. And the interesting thing is I learned something really fascinating about this, which is the people who hold on to this are people who have invested their own lives in Ripperology, which is the study of Jack the Ripper and their own egos. And so by me, you know, somebody who is an outsider from this community of Ripperologists, spent like decades some of them just like reading the same stuff over and over again either trying to solve the murder mystery or developing their own theories so that me this outsider comes and says well actually this is kind of wrong it just totally disrupted their sense

of identity their ego it was like me saying to a load of men well actually you're wrong and they were just utterly horrified i mean months before the book even came out before any of them had ever even read it. I had this man who is, you know, one of this sort of more preeminent riparologists, basically threatening me on Twitter saying, you can't talk about your research until we vetted it. And like, excuse me? And then being laughed at. And then I get blamed somehow for being somebody who incited problems when these people were tearing apart a book they hadn't read. And then when the book came out, claimed to be impartial in their criticism. You know, there's a big difference between criticism and trolling.

And it was pretty incessant trolling. And being also compared to a Holocaust denier, being called a liar, being called a fraud, somebody who made stuff up, who hid evidence. I mean, these are people who would stop at nothing to prove that they were right. And that somehow I had straight into their territory. So there's this whole thing about, like, everybody feels they own these women. And that's what makes me so angry is that how dare a group of people feel ownership over these women, these poor women, who have never been able just to have a story and be recognized as individuals,

apart from Jack Ripper, and apart from men who wanted to own them? Awful for you to have experienced it, I have no doubt, but just to watch it happening was fascinating, trying to get a handle on what it was that had so upset this community. Because surely, if your research had turned up, oh, actually, no, they weren't selling sex, they were teachers and this one was a dentist, that doesn't change the fact that they were still killed by this person. So, like, I could never quite get my head around.

What is it that's so fundamentally disturbing about taking away this prostitute label hundreds of years later? Well, I think there has been an actual deliberate misreading of my work in some cases where people have said, oh, she's anti-sex worker because what she wants to do is exactly the opposite of what I've done. I don't even how you can even get that message from the book where I say, literally, at the end of the book, they were women, they were human beings, and that in itself is enough. I mean, what part of that is, you know, I don't understand. I think it is just a desire to own the narrative. And actually, I think it's about them. It's about personal egos, male egos, some female egos,

and just using these women for their own sense of identity. I'll be back with Halle after this short break. The book is not doing a Mary Magdalene thing, which is like, how dare you call her a prostitute? She wasn't that awful thing, is it's certainly not doing that. It's saying, these are lives of these women, there's some evidence that some of them were selling sex, but interestingly, some evidence there isn't for others. And the argument that they must have been selling sex because they were poor doesn't make any sense if you try and said that today, that if you're a homeless woman, you must be selling sex as well. That doesn't make sense today. Why would that make sense in the 19th century? But it did show me just how entrenched,

and powerful that narrative is. And for my own money on it, is it seems to me that it's because by doing that, by clinging onto that label of they were prostitutes, is it helps the Ripper narrative that we're so familiar with, the cloak and the cobbled streets of swirling old London smog and all of that stuff. Because you know what?

A serial killer who killed homeless women is not as sexy as a serial killer who killed whores, right? That's the hook. That's it. that's what people like. He doesn't seem like some sort of rock star if he's killing homeless women. No, that doesn't have the same ring to it at all, does it?

Exactly. Wow. It's bizarre when you just like press pause on these things and you start to unpack it of like, yeah, just when you said that there, that does not have the same impact. When you're studying this stuff and you're studying the history of murders and particularly how women have been killed,

the Jack the Ripper narrative is far reaching and it's not just in people that really like to research this from historians' point of view. It's in the media and it's in policing as well, because the name Ripper repeats. It gets given to different serial killers, doesn't it? And you've researched other Rippers. So for my podcast, the next season of my podcast, we are actually looking at someone who was called the Blackout Ripper during the Blitz.

And obviously we know about the Yorkshire Ripper also. Almost a hundred years later, we have another killer who's called Ripper. But Blackout Ripper is the subject of my podcast, which is The Ripper Retold. So the first season was an expansion of my book. And we kind of went into all sorts of corners and expanded on things and spoke to academics and judges and sex workers. Give it a name, drop, Holly. The name of your podcast is? It's called Bad Women, The Ripper Retold.

That was the first season. The second season is called Bad Women, the Blackout Ripper. And that drops on the 11th of October. And so the Blackout Ripper was a man called Gordon Cummings, who was in the Air Force. I don't actually want to go into that much detail about him. Because ultimately what we're doing with this podcast and what we were doing in the first season, and what I feel very strongly about is this is not about the murder per se. it's about the women, the society, the circumstances that created this murderer and created the victims

and created the situation. So we're really examining London during the Blitz and Britain during the war and how a lot of violence against women went under the radar because we were so distracted with winning a war and because London was being bombed. And we look into women's lives and what they were like. And we look into the lives of the four women he killed and the two women he attempted to kill who survived. And we look at a number of other cases from that time as well, cases of sexual assault, cases of domestic violence,

which ended in murder as well. Who were the victims of the blackout ripper? So the victims of the blackout ripper were, Evelyn Hamilton, Evelyn Oatley, Margaret Lowe, Catherine Mulcaulhy, who survived, and Dorjeunet, who was killed, and another woman who was called Margaret Hayward, but went by the name of Greta, Greta Haywood, who also survived. So thankfully, these women, the ones who survived were able to inform the police and were responsible for getting him arrested. But the four other women were killed in some pretty horrific circumstances. And there is a sex worker link between them as well, with the

exception of the first one, Evelyn Hamilton. But this is often the case, you know, I mean, I like to say that although a lot of these murders are sexually driven, they're women-hating murders. Sometimes the fact that their sex workers does play into it. It certainly makes them more vulnerable, but much like Jack the Ripper, much like the Yorkshire Ripper, these people, these men killed women because they hated women. And sex workers are women. And we have to stop hiving them off as some separate thing. There's a lot of research about this. I hear people say, if you're a sex worker, I suppose there is a certain level of vulnerability because you have to meet someone. And when it's criminalized, you have to meet them in a clandestine way. But

there are many professions where you meet somebody in their home. And they, aren't subject to this kind of stigma. There's a lot of research coming out about why serial killers attack sex workers. And it's not just that they are available. It's that, like you said, they are symbolic to them of a sexual woman. Yeah. And a stigmatized woman as well. And any group of people that you stigmatize, violence is enabled against them.

And there's been research by a Canadian professor called John Loman in 2000, I think it was, who traced newspaper reportings around street-based sex work, and he charted violence against them. And he found that whenever there was a media campaign to clean up the streets or get rid of these women, violence against them escalated because they're a stigmatized group of people. Yeah, absolutely.

It's very interesting that the sort of interplay between that and how we tacitly allow that violence to occur. Yeah, absolutely. Is it the case that whenever there's a circle who attacks women that are selling sex, that's when the Ripper label is applied? Yeah, I think it is. It tends to be, I mean, just anecdotally from what I've read from my experience, you know, I'm not a criminologist, I'm certainly not an expert, and the whole canon of murderers who have been given the label Ripper, but it seems to be the case because of this connection,

the Ripper killed prostitutes. Therefore, men who cut up women who are out on the street, But, I mean, the Yorkshire Ripper used a hammer. I mean, that case is a perfect example of how the Ripper stigma still plays out. And exactly like your research showed, there's evidence, actually, that at least one of the woman that they called a prostitute, Wilma McCann, there's no evidence that she was selling sex, apart from what Peter Sutcliffe himself said. But that's an example of an investigation that was pretty much derailed by stigma around sex work, wasn't it?

Yeah, that's right. And as we well know, you know, the police have a long way to go in terms of cleaning up their prejudices about a whole load of things. They are not the most female friendly or open-minded about race or anything. So it's not difficult to believe that these attitudes are very systemic and they allow violence to go under the radar in some cases. If you speak to any sex worker rights groups or communities today, they still have an incredibly problematic relationship. police. There are efforts by various police forces to encourage women to come forward to to report crimes and blah, blah, blah. But historically, there's an awfully long way to go to

repair that kind of reputation because as long as things are criminalised, you're effectively reporting a crime. Many sex workers have reported sexual assault from police force or stigma or prejudice or an idea that they shouldn't report something against them because they're going to be told that they deserved it. In your thoughts, what do we kind of need to do going forward talking about these kind of crimes. Like when you might start identifying this stuff in action, as it were, when you're watching a serial killer documentary or something, what do we need to do going forward?

Oh, I just think we've got to stop. We've got to move the focus off of the killer. It's funny because there are a lot of people who don't get it. They don't get the idea that glamorizing the killer, you know, but we're not glamourizing. We're not making him look like he's, you know, or rock star or anything like that. He's, you know, he's awful. no, no, no, glamorizing means putting the spotlight on him, making it all about him.

And I think a lot of people are just so not accustomed to actually even hearing crime stories, which aren't murderer-centric, that they don't know, they don't know how to process, they don't know what other options there are in terms of restructuring the narrative and how we can tell these stories. it will always be, well, the murder is the most important person, he's the protagonist. And my argument is the murder isn't the protagonist necessarily. We don't even have to ascribe a protagonist. There are other ways to discuss this. There are other ways in. I have seen since your book a shift in how true crime documentaries are made and the kind of tone of them. And there seems to be more of a recognition of like, Jesus Christ, we've just spent ages,

just given the serial killers funny nicknames, and we've just spent an hour on this documentary talking about all this violence that they did. And it's like people suddenly caught up and like, oh, fuck. Yeah, we haven't actually spoken. There's been documentaries now about the victims of Dennis Nielsen and about the stigma that they were subject to victims of Jeffrey Dalma. But again, I kind of see this slight thing creeping through. There are the more salacious documentaries there,

but they seem to have tacked on this kind of, but obviously we need to remember the victims. They're just doing the same thing, but they're putting that at the end. I know. It drives me bananas. It really does. And I've seen this kind of battle go on within production companies that I've spoken to that want to do something with my material and other material. And it's like, oh, we're going to do this and with it. But you see, the thread that runs through it has to be him. It has to be the tension. No, there are other ways of doing this. It doesn't have to be about the murderer. Oh, but then you lose the tension. No. there are other ways of doing it. If you've just spent an hour talking about somebody being disemboweled, putting a nice memorial to them on the end is probably not helping the fact that this is a real person. Absolutely. It's, you know, like let's focus on the crime. Yeah, let's talk about all the injuries.

Let's talk about how it happened. Let's look at the blood and the gut. Share photos. Share photos. And then, oh, moment of silence for the victims. No, it doesn't work that way. You're not a victim-centric program. or series or, you know, story if you do that. I mean, we've still got a long way to go, I suppose, but at least people are becoming more aware of it that it's kind of problematic. Like, people are finally starting to go, actually, is having a street tour of the Jack, the Ripa victims?

Is that a good thing? I mean, just frame that of, like, would you have a Jamie Bulger murder tour or a Harold Shipman? Like, when you think about that, it's so insane. Yeah, it is insane. But it's somehow become, like, cultural background noise that we're like, oh yeah, it's good fun.

I hear this, and it's one for us as historians to grapple with, which is, oh, yeah, but it was so long ago. What does it matter? And then I point out, well, actually, it wasn't that long ago, and actually these women have descendants alive today. And the sex worker community is very much alive today and aware of this, and every time, even though we're talking about people 100 years ago, if we try to dress up that, oh, isn't it kind of like a sort of a staged theater production

because they were prostitutes, that has a resonance with people and how we talk about it today. It just does. It does. And again, I don't think people are aware of the way in which we hear ambience stories, you know, and that becomes the norm, and we take it in. And then that becomes our default setting, you know, and that's what we understand, and that's the prison through which we see various things. And that truism, I say, with air quotes, is constantly being reaffirmed.

that Jack Vipper killed prostitutes, that it's okay to kill prostitutes, that prostitutes get killed, that being a prostitute means you're putting yourself in danger, it's your own fault if you die, you know, all of this stuff. And if you check people on that, like were to grab anybody and say, hang on, can we kind of unpack this a little bit?

Do you believe this? Do you believe? No, I don't. I don't. Most of them will say that. But yet they're parroting these things. That's the same for every really kind of, of unpalatable set of beliefs we have, whether that's misogyny, whether that's racism. It's certain things that if we don't correct this, and by correct, I mean, just even stop and

examine them. I'm not talking about a puritanical movement to like check what everybody says all the time and punish people for saying things and there's a wrong thing and there's a right thing. But stop, pause, think. That's the most important thing. You know, and this is a same time, it surprises people when I say this. I think the idea of banning Jack the repertoos in the East End, that's never going to happen, and I think it would be wrong. First of all, there's something to be learned from it. Second of all, not all of them are bad. And also, as you know and I know and sex workers know, the moment you ban things is the moment they become taboo and then all hell breaks loose. And it's not the most responsible thing to do. Before I let you go,

I can talk to you forever about this. You know that. But tell me about your new podcast. Tell me one of the things that you're looking at on the new upcoming podcast. It sounds fascinating. Oh, it is fascinating. And we're still in the process of recording it and putting it together. So it's very interesting to suddenly move into the 1940s and to look at Britain at war and to look at women and to also look at how women's lives changed really quite dramatically in the 20th century. And also to look at at links again, I mean, there's so many similarities between the women who were the victims of the Blackout Ripper and the women who were the victims of Jack the Ripper, and that they came from backgrounds of poverty, broken homes, tremendous hardship. It's interesting to trace that. It's

interesting to see how often that paves a road for a lot of women to go into sex work. Again, I think when we're looking at modern urban problems and issues, I think looking back to the past can be really useful because we do have effectively kind of data sets. We can look at other cases. We can see how long these problems have been in existence. And we question that. And then it can help us reflect on why we haven't been able to adequately address these problems today. So, you know, history does serve a really important purpose and we can really harness that. But it is interesting, effectively, like, I'm looking at this very much as a historian, and so I'm

interested in sort of social history data sets. And so I'm looking at two sets of like what has changed, what has stayed the same. Women had much more opportunity in the 20th century. So, for example, a woman like Evelyn Hamilton, who was the first victim, really escaped this kind of pattern of poverty that was very similar to what someone like Annie Chapman or Polly Nichols experience. She came from a very similar background. But because education was so much more widely available to women in the 20th century, she was able to train as a pharmacist and to be a single woman who lived on her own, who supported herself, she got a degree, she took exams, she got qualifications, and her sister, again from the same background, became a nurse,

went into nursing. Now, this only started to happen for women. really at the very, very end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century and all these possibilities opened up for them, women of the working classes. And it completely revolutionized women's lives and their ability to be autonomous, which is amazing. To make their own money. To make their own money and to be independent. But, you know, the interesting thing is like the fact that she was a victim

of the Blackout River is kind of questioning this autonomy that women had also at the time. And during the Second World War, like, everything was in disarray. You know, the men were gone. Women were shagging American soldiers and, like, everybody that they felt able to, you know, there were women entering the army, you know, and it was kind of believed it was like a kind of sexual free-for-all with these women. And there was a lot of misogyny as a result of this, and a lot of this misogyny led to

violence. The army in many cases upheld this misogyny and still does. We talked to a former member of the US Army, a woman, who talks about the treatment she received about how women should just accept rape and sexual assault within the army today. And that was what women of the ATS during the Second War were expected to do also. It's amazing, isn't it? Just you look at things like that and then you're horrified. You're like, I can't believe that happened.

And then you find trace echoes of it or not even an echo that it's actually still very much enforced today, we're still doing the same thing. Again, this is like the thing that is just so chilling about whether it's the victims of Jack the Ripper, whether it's what happened during the Second World War. These problems are still here. You know, it's really hard to kind of sit there with this and think, why? Why? After all of these years, some cases, you know, 130 years longer even.

Why are we still content to live with this? Why is this still a part of our lives? Oh, Hallie, I wish I had an easy answer for you, but it's been amazing to talk to you. Thank you so much. If people want to know more about you or your work, where can they find you? Well, I'm on Twitter. I have a website, which is my name.com, Hallie Ribonholds. But most importantly, please listen to bad women, both season one and season two,

which is dropping on the 11th of October, wherever you get your podcasts. It's so good, honestly, I can't recommend it enough. Thank you so much for joining me today. Oh, it's been an absolute pleasure. always fun to talk to you, Kate. Thank you so much, everyone, for listening. And thank you to Hallie for coming on the podcast and for sharing your research. Please do check out her podcast, Bad Women.

It's so good. And if you like what you've heard, please don't forget to like, review and subscribe, wherever it is that you get your podcasts. We honestly do love hearing your feedback. We've got episodes coming up on Gothic fiction, in decent exposure and haunted houses, and I'll see you soon. This episode includes music by Epidemic Sound. Thank you.