Fet Milner

Jack the Ripper

Being Women's Week, I thought it pertinent to examine misogyny, the hatred of woman (from Greek: miso-, to hate; gune, woman). While in the modern time the greatest source of misogyny appears to be a society formed under misogynistic and patriarchal dictates, in the past there were more fearsome -- though, admittedly, more isolated -- sources. From this font of violence comes that man I recently dubbed "the Grand Poobah of Serial Killers", Jack the Ripper. And so I found a topic far more interesting than misogyny; oddly, I didn't have to work hard to find it.

Although Jack the Ripper is only credited with five murders (to be fair, a further 13 murders are considered possible Ripper handiwork), these were of the most heinously brutal form. As he worked his grisly way to Marie Jeanette Kelly, the final victim, his frenzies drew him into more ritualistic and detailed mutilations, such that one might consider Jack the Ripper the greatest misogynist of all time.

Marie Kelly, being the last, was the most cruelly eviscerated. The first, Mary Ann Nicholls, "merely" had her throat cut down to the bone from ear to ear. Annie Chapman, eight days later, had her throat cut all the way round, her intestines cut from her body and placed over her shoulders, and her uterus, vagina and bladder taken (never to be recovered). Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes, a mere three weeks on, had both their throats cut, and Catherine also had her intestines drawn from her abdomen and placed about her, the lobe of her right ear cut off, her nose severed, triangles cut into her cheeks, part of her liver and one kidney removed as well as the womb, and her eyelids were cut through vertically, but without damage to the eyeball.

And so we reach Marie Kelly, most violated of all these women. When Marie was found, a little over a month after Elizabeth and Catherine, few that saw the body could look at it directly. Not only had her throat been cut, but a veritable catalogue of mutilations were perpetrated: all the meat of her abdomen and thighs was removed and scattered variously -- though carefully -- about the room; her breasts were severed and her organs were all entirely removed, such that her uterus, one kidney and a breast were found under her head, the other breast and liver at her feet, the intestines and spleen placed beside her, other organs in various places and conditions (some cut into pieces) and her heart entirely missing; her face was savagely hacked apart, so that she could only be identified by her ears and hair. There was a two-metre wide pool of blood beneath the bed on which she lay.

Jack the Ripper survives to this day in the popular imagination; Jack the Ripper proves, possibly, the streak of misogyny in all too many of us.

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