Revisionist History - The Revisionist History Holiday Sampler

Episode Date: December 21, 2021

Sharing special previews of Pushkin’s show Bad Women: Ripper Retold and this month’s Pushkin+ episode, ‘The Dog-tor WIll See You Now’  You know the story: In 1888, five female prostitutes were brutally murdered in a London slum-- attacks so violent the killer earned a nickname: Jack the Ripper. For centuries, we have assumed these women were indeed “Bad Women,” ...but what if everything we know about them is wrong?Historian Hallie Rubenhold has uncovered the true stories of the Ripper’s victims. Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine and Mary Jane all struggled against the misogyny that thrived in Victorian England, until they found themselves in the path of one of the most vicious killers in history. Bad Women is rich in historical detail and suspenseful enough to satisfy any true crime fan. You can binge the entire season now at https://link.chtbl.com/revisionistbadwomenPlus, a sneak peek at the fourth in our series of subscriber episodes, an ode to the powerful pups who can sniff out the toughest of viruses worldwide–even at a Metallica concert. To hear the rest, subscribe to Pushkin+ by visiting our show page in Apple Podcasts or at Pushkin.fm/plus. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. called Bad Women, Ripper Retold. You know the story. In 1888, five female prostitutes were brutally murdered in a London slum. Attacks so violent, the killer earned a nickname, Jack the Ripper. For centuries, we've assumed these women were indeed bad women. But what if everything we know about them is wrong? Historian Hallie Rubenhold has uncovered the true stories of the Ripper's victims. Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine, and Mary Jane all struggled against the misogyny that thrived in Victorian England until they found themselves in the path of one of the most vicious killers in history. Listeners are loving the show. I've called it brilliant, a badly missing

layer to the story, addicting, fascinating, informative, and entertaining, and a historical treat. Bad Women is critically acclaimed. It's been deemed one of the best true crime podcasts by The Guardian, Vulture, and Esquire.

Vulture said Hallie takes aim at her critics in her first episode and continues throughout to satisfyingly skewer ripperologists, especially one former officer who seems to think the murder victims at the heart of the case must have done something to warrant their gutting one way or another. If you haven't listened to Bad Women yet, I don't know what you're waiting for. I'm going to share a preview now that will get you totally hooked.

You can binge the entire season on all your holiday travels and staycations. Just search for Bad Women wherever you get your podcasts. It's a warm September evening. The sky has darkened and a moon has risen over the flat, oily river. Hundreds of day-trippers and pleasure-seekers are aboard the Princess Alice as she steams through London.

Music, singing, and the excited shouts of children give the so-called Moonlight Cruise a holiday feel. No one notices that the craft is moving directly into the course of a great iron-hulled freighter. The Princess Alice plows on, her paddle wheels biting into the rank, sewage-pleated waters of the Thames. What unfolds over the next few terrible minutes will be a tragedy for the city, but an opportunity for Elizabeth's stride. It may be the first time she has benefited from the misfortune of others, but it will

not be the last, before she meets her murderer on the streets of Whitechapel. I'm Hallie Rubenhold. You're listening to Bad Women, The Ripper Retold, a series about the real lives of the women killed by Jack the Ripper, and how we got their stories so wrong. One side money plenty And friends too by the score Then fortune smiled upon me And no one passed my door Now I'm poor and lonely I don't know. Open Down Elizabeth Gustav's daughter was born by candlelight in the darkness of a Swedish November. Her father tended the land in rural Torslanda, cultivating fields of grain, flax and potatoes.

He also owned a barn, several cows, pigs, chickens and a horse. The family was more prosperous than many in the area and Elizabeth grew up in a sturdy clapboard farmhouse. As a farmer's daughter in the 1840s, she would have been initiated into the routine of agricultural life as soon as she was steady enough on her feet to carry pails and gather eggs. When she grew older, she would have assisted with milking, tending the chickens and pigs, making butter, and even distilling aquavit, the alcoholic liquor traditionally offered at mealtimes in Swedish households.

Elizabeth's local community was small and conservative. She was raised a Lutheran, and prayer would have punctuated her days, upon waking, before meals, and before bed, asking the Lord to shepherd his flock safely through the long night. As a girl, little was expected of her beyond mastery of housekeeping, childcare, and basic animal husbandry, all of which she could learn from assisting her mother. She therefore received little schooling. Elizabeth probably grew accustomed to the constant rhythm of farm life. The turning of the seasons, the cutting of the fields,

the freezing of the earth, the thaw, the sowing of seeds. But just before her 17th birthday, everything changed. Elizabeth set out for the city of Gothenburg to seek employment as a servant. In Sweden, as in other European countries, it was traditional for young women to gain experience of domestic life beyond the confines of their homes and communities. This was seen as a kind of apprenticeship before they eventually assumed command of their own households. Elizabeth went to work as a maid for a lower middle-class family. Domestic labour at this time was cheap and in plentiful supply, so even families of

meagre means could afford to hire help. Employers were obliged to house, feed, clothe and tend to their servants when they were ill. In return, servants offered their complete obedience. Yet choosing and hiring a servant could also be risky. Bringing unknown young women into the home could have unpredictable consequences. There was a preference for the ruddy-cheeked daughters of yeomen, who smelled like grass and goats. It was believed that these girls had not yet learned how to deceive or steal. They were innocent and honest.

By contrast, urban girls had been exposed to avarice and licentiousness. Although it was a master or mistress's responsibility to keep them safe, peril nonetheless lurked at every turn for maidservants. Whether or not she encouraged the advances of the master or his son, his brother, cousin, friend, or father, there were plenty of opportunities for a young servant woman to find herself alone with men, to be coerced, overpowered, or to give in to mutual desire. And so, while service was believed to be the making of a young working-class woman, becoming entangled with a man could be her undoing. Some women's lovers would promise to look after them,

and many made good on these pledges, establishing their mistresses and lodgings. Some men lived alongside their paramours, and they posed as married couples. Others visited only on occasion. Some relationships continued for many years, if not a lifetime, but many more fell apart within weeks. The 19th century double standard enabled men to walk away from such attachments. By contrast, it often devastated the lives of the women who were left to bear the crying and gurgling consequences of these unions. Elizabeth has taken to the grave the name of the man who altered her life with his lust. It will never be known whether her first encounter with him was consensual or forced, where it occurred or under what circumstances, but by March 1865 she was six months pregnant

and whoever had got her into that position was no longer present to shield her from the consequences. Until the 1860s in Sweden, extramarital sex and illegitimate pregnancy were illegal, punishable offences. In fact, across all Europe and its colonies, sexual immorality was a source of anxiety verging on paranoia. In Gothenburg, the prostitution police were charged with placing women on the sex trade register, colloquially referred to as the register of shame. There were two lists, one containing the names of acknowledged prostitutes and the other of suspected women, pregnant single women, women frequently seen alone with men or out at night, and the other of suspected women, pregnant single women, women frequently seen alone with men or out at night, and mistresses.

The chief concern was the spread of venereal disease, specifically syphilis, and bad women were seen as responsible for its spread. This belief was then used to justify the harsh treatment of women in legislation designed to prevent infection. When her pregnancy began to show, it was surmised that 21-year-old Elizabeth was guilty of lecherous living. She was ordered to appear at the police inspection house. On her first visit, she was entered into the official register as Public Woman No. 97. She was then further questioned and her answers included in the ledger. Age, 21 years.

Appearance, blue eyes, brown hair, straight nose, oval face. Five foot two inches. Slender build. I surmise that this woman has not been living a life of gluttony. The rules that were to govern Elizabeth's daily life would then have been explained to her, a lecture intended to humiliate her. You will attend the inspection house twice a week on Tuesdays and Fridays,

or face arrest and a fine, or three nights in prison on rations of bread and water. You will not be permitted outdoors after 11 at night. You must conduct a quiet and a silent life. You must not loiter in the windows or doorway of your home. You must dress in a decent way when appearing in public and not call attention to yourself. At the police inspection house, Elizabeth would have been subjected to regular examinations of her genitalia. This routine was designed as much to

chasten the city's public women as to screen them against the dreaded syphilis. Syphilis is transmitted primarily through sexual intercourse and it has three key stages in its acquired form, primary, secondary and tertiary. Anne Hanley is a lecturer in the history of science and medicine at Birkbeck University of London. The primary stage is characterised by the presence of a soft sore or a canker at the site of infection. So in most cases, this would have been on a person's genitals. And this sore could appear a couple of weeks to several months after infection, and it would last for a short period of time and then disappear. And when it disappeared, the patient moved into a period of disease latency.

The secondary stage could occur anywhere from several months to several years later. Patients would experience flu-like symptoms, a fever, swollen glands, a sore throat, and then the eruption of a rash, as well as wart-like growths and lesions on their genitals. Eventually, it would attack the person's central nervous system. Sufferers might experience behavioural changes, including paranoia and mood swings, deterioration of the spinal cord and seizures. There were other visible symptoms as well. The soft tissue in a person's face begins to break down, this type of necrotic deterioration where a person's nose disintegrates essentially, as does their soft palate and parts of their frontal lobe. Syphilis affected fertility too, and could be passed on to a fetus before

birth, so-called congenital syphilis. In the days before antibiotics, this was a terrible disease. So as to avoid giving offence to Gothenburg's respectable citizens, all suspected and known public women were required to enter the police inspection house through a concealed rear passage. Once inside, they had to strip naked and form a line. Sometimes, if the wait was a long one, they were ordered to stand in the outdoor courtyard, shivering in the cold as the uniformed officers stood over them. For a young woman who had been raised in a religious community,

the indignity of the experience would have been shocking. However, as Elizabeth was pregnant with an illegitimate child, she may well, like so many women of her era, have internalized her punishment as a justifiable one. Elizabeth can only have been subjected to this routine a handful of times before it was discovered that she was presenting the symptoms of syphilis. She was immediately admitted to the Cahuset, or cure house, the local venereal disease hospital. These treatment centres, also known as lock hospitals, were designed for poor people. A stay here carried profound stigma.

And this was in part a deterrent as well. Like the shame and stigma that accompanied entry into a workhouse, a similar stigma existed for the locked hospitals. And these were institutions that were often seriously underfunded, understaffed and lacked the facilities needed to be able to provide people with effective care, even by Victorian standards. Patients at these institutions were effectively imprisoned, hence the name Lock Hospital. Some women entered voluntarily, but many were incarcerated against their will.

At Gothenburg's Cure House, attendance in nurses used force to subdue patients. It was also overcrowded, and when the number of patients exceeded capacity, inmates were made to sleep on the floor. Mercury was the go-to treatment for syphilis at this time. The standard forms were an ointment, pill, or tonic. But doctors also experimented with other modes of administration. Fumigation, I think, is the best way to describe it.

So you'd sit in essentially something that looked a bit like a steam room and mercury-infused vapors would be pumped in and you sit there and you sort of absorb it through your skin. There was no standardized dosage for mercury. Doctors saw its administration as an art rather than a science. It was also highly toxic and potentially deadly. Severe mercury poisoning could result in everything from loosened to lost teeth and fetid breath all the way through to hair loss and a changed mental state. Very similar symptoms to what you might expect in the later stages of syphilis itself. Pregnant Elizabeth was spared mercury but treated internally with acid while her genital warts would have been dehydrated or cut off. After receiving this cure for 17 days,

she went into premature labour. Elizabeth gave birth to a stillborn girl at seven months while under lock and key at the cure house. A birth certificate was still required. The space for the father's name was left blank. Methods of treating syphilis varied between countries, but they shared an underlying concept. Women should shoulder the blame for its transmission. If the state could control the morally corrupt woman the disease is spreaders, then the problem would be isolated. Sexually transmitted disease involves two parties, of course, but male carriers were exempt from regulation.

Unfortunately, the idea that women, specifically female sex workers, are solely responsible for the spread of disease and should be punished for it is one that we haven't left behind. There's been a long history of sex workers being imprisoned under public health justifications. Grace is a sex worker from the UK who contacted me after reading my work on Elizabeth's life. People fear that we will be seen as vectors of disease. So unfortunately, these attitudes do still persist. And clients let you know about it.

Believe me, they'll say things and you think, oh, piss off, mate. Do you know what I mean? In Elizabeth's time, as for Grace today, attitudes and fears around the spread of disease caused women real physical harm too. Syphilis inspections were brutally rapid. 50 women might be examined using the same medical instrument in less than two hours, says Anne Hanley. And that speculum was then passed to the attending nurse, who sort of cursorily disinfected it for use on the next patient.

There's no way that these diagnostic examinations were thorough, and there's no way that they were hygienic. In many cases, women who may not have had a venereal disease were being infected by the very process of examination to determine whether or not they were infected. Even if women seemed to respond to the rudimentary cures on offer and were released from the hospital, their slate wasn't wiped clean. Criminal convictions followed those who had been inmates at lock hospitals, and once a woman appeared on a police register, she would not be able to secure respectable work. One of the only ways that she could actually sustain herself would be to resort to the profession she had been accused of practicing, prostitution. Elizabeth joined the ranks of women who sold themselves on a notorious Gothenburg

thoroughfare known mockingly as the Street of Many Nymphs. As open solicitation on the street was forbidden, she would have traded discreetly indoors, at a brothel perhaps, or in a coffeehouse. Elizabeth had been publicly denounced as a whore, had suffered the indignity of police examination, had discovered she carried a potentially deadly and disfiguring disease, and had been incarcerated and subjected to excruciating medical procedures. Estranged from her family and from respectable life, she had then been released onto the street, with no friend to whom she could turn in the city. It was now that the symptoms of syphilis returned, and medical incarceration was ordered once more.

But just when things looked to be at their bleakest, an opportunity appeared. One that would change Elizabeth's life forever. That was a preview of Bad Women. You can binge the entire season right now wherever you listen to podcasts. It's a powerful show, and I'm very proud that Pushkin is able to bring it to you. One last thing before you go, a little extra gift for the holidays. I just have to share a preview of this month's bonus episode of Revisionist History exclusively for Pushkin Plus subscribers. Pushkin Plus has everything you love about Pushkin shows, plus so much more. Ad-free listening, behind-the-scenes moments, bonus material, crazy asides. And the excerpt you're about to hear is from one of the last, and arguably one of our

best, offerings on Pushkin Plus this year. It's a follow-up to one of my favorite episodes of Revisionist History, The Dog Will See You Now. You know, the one about the COVID sniffing dogs. Well, we've gone back for more. Take a listen. A lot has happened in biodetection canines since we went to visit them. For one, the company was recently acquired by another company called Protection One Canine. That company specializes in security dogs. Now they're all part of the same doggy industrial complex. But something else happened. Some of the dogs became roadies.

Have you heard of Eric Church, the country music star who has lyrics like... We recently were part of a Wall Street Journal article, and if you read the article, Eric Church says that having the COVID dogs probably saved the tour. But that all came about because, you know, someone within Eric Church's camp was a revisionist history fan and heard the podcast. That's biodetection canine president Jerry Johnson. You heard him. Revisionist History, this very podcast, is the connector between country music and canines.

The dogs are now backstage COVID sniffers, not just for Eric Church. They're touring with bands including the Black Keys and Metallica, heavy metal canines. To work with these bands, the Lucky Dogs and their handlers travel on the road with the crew. How's everybody doing today? Does anybody here mind if I run the Cogan dog over them real quick? I'm just going to need you to stand in a single file line. And just go ahead and relax your arms down to your side. And the dog will target the left hand. Search. Good.

On the day of the show, Mindy and Lord, two adorable German Shepherd Belgian Malinois, begin work long before the music starts. So typically, the dogs will show up depending on the first call anywhere from 530 to 630 in the morning and the first people on scene are usually the recording artist people. So they'll come in at different shifts depending on what their jobs are. So they'll come in groups of anywhere from three to ten. The dogs are pre-positioned at the entrance and everybody comes in. They stand in a single file line facing the dog teams about six

feet apart. Everybody's kind of socially distanced and then what we have them do is they stand facing the dog, nothing in their left hand, and the dog comes down and sniffs their left hand, takes about a second per person and then you know when they're done then they go about and do their work. The dogs I think are probably the most popular, I almost call them people, they're most popular individuals on the show. When people arrive they can't wait to you know they automatically go to where they need to stand so they can get sniffed that is so cute you are such a sweet girl oh my goodness i love you what smart baby so smart it's it's a great environment if you like what you heard you can hear the rest by subscribing to Pushkin Plus

on the Revisionist History Show page in Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm slash plus. It's only $4.99 a month. It's a cup of coffee. And if you're already a subscriber, thank you. We hope you've enjoyed the uninterrupted listening and bonus content from other Pushkin shows. Thanks for listening and stay tuned for more bonus episodes coming soon.