Public Woman Was so Controversial

¶ … public woman" was so controversial in late-Victorian England (and Europe). The "public woman" was so controversial in England because women were selling themselves in public, and the Victorian mores of the time were strictly based on class. The upper class actually feared the lower class, and felt they were "unwashed" and unsavory. These women were also living very different, even defiant lives, and they were "seducing" men from both the upper and lower classes, which was distasteful to many people.

The author maintains that the male dominance in society led to an outcry against the public women, rather than the men who engaged them. She writes, "It established a common vocabulary and iconography of male violence that permeated the whole society, papering over class differences and obscuring the different material conditions that provoked sexual antagonism in different classes" (Walkowitz 75). Many people believed that the women's lifestyle contributed to their deaths (which of course it did), or that they somehow "deserved" it because of their lifestyle. The author continues, "Another woman believed that 'respectable women like herself had nothing to fear from the Whitechapel murderer,' as she thought it was true that he 'respects and protects respectable females'" (Walkowitz 76). The police felt the same way, and it shows how "working women" were not valued or aided by the society as a whole. There were some who tried to save them, or at least council them, but for the most part, they were left to try to earn a living any way they could, and that usually meant taking to the streets to sell themselves.

This image of a low-class fallen woman had great impact on the response to the Jack the Ripper murders in 1888. The murders frightened everyone, but public sentiment was not on the victim's side. They felt they had deserved it somehow, and it was only a minority that called out for victim's rights and reform. The "respectable" women did not have anything to worry about, and this shows the great class distinctions in England at the time. The author continues, "They reinforced prevailing prejudices about the East End as a strange territory of savages, a social abyss, an inferno" (Walkowitz 77). To the upper class, these people did not exist, and should not exist, especially the pubic women who were forced to make their life on the streets.