Serial Killers & Misogyny: Hallie Rubenhold on Betwixt the Sheets

on our screens and elsewhere in the media too. We thought you might be interested in their conversation, so here it is, and if you'd like to check out Betwixt the Sheets, you'll find it wherever you get your podcasts. It's created by our friends over at History Hit, with episodes out on Tuesdays and Fridays on everything from medieval sex to the history of cosmetic surgery. But for now, on with the conversation between Hallie and Kate. 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, led 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 and our screens 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. Hello there, I'm Kate Lister. I'm welcome to betwixt the Sheets the history of sex scandal in society.

Netflix have announced record ratings for their drama about the serial killer Jeffrey Dalmer, which was watched collectively for around one hundred and ninety six 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 sixty 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 rubin Holt, author of the award winning book of the Five, where she researched the lives of the victims of the 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 who has come to be known as the Blackout Ripper, a man who killed women during the blitz of World War Who. Halle 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.

Has a lot to think about, and I hope you find our chat interesting. Hello to Halle Rubin Hall. Thank you so much to joining me betwixt the Sheets. Oh, 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 weave its radio before and women 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 to be Did you have an inkling? No, No, I had no idea. Well, 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 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 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 Sariah killer known as Jack the Ripper, Only you're not interested in really how these women met their death, as in the Gruesome Grizzle, you're not interested in the killer. So the biography is from as much as you can get back in their past too 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 one hundred and thirty 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 awhile with any kind of research, is it someone sort of hits pause on something and goes, Guys, what the hell have we been doing? And then everyone kind of goes, oh shit, yeah, that's

really bad. Like a really reason example is like when you go back and you're watch an old episode of Friends and now you're just kind of like watching it with twenty twenty two 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 isn't 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 murderer centric, and the more gorry 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 reflect on it side this is just a bit too much, But even I with that conscious story 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, a true crime? Now, what is it that we keep returning to these stories

because they're awful stories? Yeah, they are awful. I think as humanity were 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 have avoid it.

It'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, 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 realizing 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 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, they

weren't they just prostitutes? Just that were just wow. You know, it's as if sex workers were are a separate species of women. 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 eighteen year old white university stute, virginal virginal university student is killed, Oh my god, this human 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 was addicted to drugs was in and out of prison, she goes missing and she's dead, it's like, oh, well,

why 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 a value to society as this pretty white university student is. It still shocks me to see that narrative and effect, because I'd love to be able to say that this has been consigned to the

historical husband, 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, you ask yourself, would that article have been with the headline of however this person earned their

money if it was anyone else. You're listening to a special crossover episode of Bad Women and betwixt the sheets, they'll be more chat after this short break when we talk 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 research 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 ring 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 Victorians. Consigned to the dustpin. 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 eighteenth or nineteenth century think of our modern era if they see I think we were nude, wouldn't they? They would think it was just a NonStop orgy. In twenty four cent and everybody who was depraved and this

was you know, go Morai. By contrast, their views were so black and white of what woman who 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 who was suspect at the 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 then broken women and the fold 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, can 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. And for us to broadly say, oh, they were all prostitutes, because the Victorian police that 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 Elizabeth Cass, who was a seams was mistaken as being a street walker. And then the police code had to be changed about how sex workers were arrested and how they were identified. And 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 prostitute, it was largely kind of an arbitrary label. And if we just accept whatever the victorians said about women who were down on their luck. We're taking in all of that morality into the press 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 a 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 are a lot of people who were furious at the suggestion not all of them had been telling 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 ripparology, 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 riparologists. You know, 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 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 imminent ripparologists basically threatening me on Twitter saying you can't talk about your research until we've vetted it, like excuse me, and then being aft 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, a 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 head 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 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 know, 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 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. And 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. 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. 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 sound 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 made sense in the nineteenth century. But it did show me just how entrenched and powerful that narrative is.

And for my own money on it, 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 woman. No, that doesn't have the same ring to it at all, does it? Exactly? Wow, it's bizarre when you just like press paws 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 historian's point of view and 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 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 and give it a name. Drop, Pali, 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 length 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 this 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. 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 was the victims did the Blackout Ripper? So the victims of the Blackout Ripper were Evelyn Hamilton, Evelyn Oatley, Margaret Lowe, Katherine McCaughey who survived and Door Joanne who was killed and another woman who was called Margaret Hayward but went by the name of Gretta Gretta Hayward, 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 they're sex workers does play into it.

It certainly makes them more vulnerable. But much like Jack the Ripper, much like a 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, but 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, an a stigmatized woman as well.

And any group of people that you stigmatize violent is enabled against them and There's been research by a Canadian professoral John Loman in two thousand, 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 in the whole cannon 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 or but I mean the rs

ripper used the 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 women that they called a prostitute Wilmam account, 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, the police suffer 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 with the police. There are efforts by various police forces to encourage women to come forward to report crimes and blah blah, but historically there's an awfully long way to go to repair that kind of reputation because as long as things are criminalized, you're effectively reporting a crime. Many sex workers are 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 glamorized, and we're not making him look like he's all rocks 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 murderer 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, in 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 any 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 dam But again, I kind of see this slight in 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 it but you see the thread that runs through It has to be him. It has to be the tension had 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 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, it's probably not helping the fact that this was 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 gun, jair photos, jair 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 it's having a street tour of the Jack the Ripper 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 for 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 if we're talking about people one hundred years ago, if we trying to dress up that, oh, isn't it kind of like a sort of 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 ambient 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 prism through which we see various things. And that truism, I say with air quotes, is constantly being reaffirmed. That Jack Roper killed prostitutes, So it's okay, hey, to kill prostitutes, a prostitutes to 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 we're to grab anybody and say, pang on, can we kind of unpack this a little bit? Do you believe this? Do you? No? I don't. I don't. Most of them will say that, but yet they're parroting these things. It's the same for every really kind 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 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. At the same time, it surprises people when I say this.

I think the idea of banning Jack the reppertures 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, and I can talk to you firm about this. You know that. But

tell me about the new podcast. Tell me all 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 nineteen forties 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 twentieth century. And also to look at links again, I mean, there's so many similarities between the women men 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, So I'm interested in sort of social three 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 twentieth century. So, for example, 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 Paul Nichol's experience. She came from a very similar background, but because education was so much more widely available to women in the twentieth 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 nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth 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 just accept rape and sexual assault within the army today and that was what women of the ATS during the Second War we're expected to do. Also. It's amazing, and it just you look at things like that and then you're horrified, 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 in force 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, one hundred and thirty years longer even, why are we still content to live with this?

Why is this still a part of our lives? Oh? Helly, I wish I had an easy anthrophy, but it has 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 dot com Hallie Ribbin Holts. But most importantly, please listen to Bad Women, both season one and season two, which is dropping on the eleventh of October wherever you get your podcasts. It's

so good anto 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 with you and subscribe wherever it is that you get your podcasts. We honestly do love it

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