Victim Conversation (off-topic moved)

[Jeff Leahy]

Clearly we are discussing the victims of jack the Ripper so the inclusion of all the women would appear relevant..

And yet again you make the same assumptions with no proof to back up your ‘Bad Mother’ character assassinations.

We know nothing about Emma Smiths relationship with her children. When they were born, how long she breast fed them, whether she tucked them in at night. Whether she gave up food so they could eat?

WE JUST DO NOT KNOW.

We don’t know how long Martha was in labor whether she rejected them at birth, suffered from depression, had them adopted. Or if she told them bed time stories?

WE JUST DO NOT KNOW

We do not know why Rose Mylett let her mother bring up her child. We do not know if she ever gave her a hug or just totally ignored her daughter..

In short we don’t know what sort of mothers these women were because there is NO historical record.

Yet you continue with this constant fantasizing, they must have done this, they must have done that…

We don’t know. We are not even certain whether or not Mary Kelly ever had children. Its not known.

So lets get to the chase:

ALLY “As for whether or not Kate was beaten by her husband or not, what actual relevance does it have to her being a crap mother? She was a crap mother. I don't care if her husband beat her, one has nothing to do with the other.”

I don’t know what silver spoon world you evolved from Ally but this is exactly the sort of Mary Antoinette comment that we have come to expect from you. What difference does it make that these women lived in a world where beatings from men were common place? Where there was no health care, no public sanitation. Where you could be thrown in debtors prison and left to rot because of a few shillings. Where life expectancy was low and infant mortality was high. Where these women dreaded being taken to hospital because they new they would probably die there.

You criticize these women as mothers yet they were probably far more familiar with child birth than you in your twenty first century luxury home could ever imagine, there were no maternity units. Try researching some of the squalid conditions that existed in JtR whitchapel. There were no cleaning products or vacuum cleaners. And very little money. Life was very hard.

No one has ever suggested that these women were angels they clearly were NOT. But why it would be historically inaccurate to suggest they were, it is equally ridiculous to pass judgment without considering the time and social conditions in which they lived. They were a product of their age. And however much you spin and vent your poison the FACT remains you have NO idea what these women were actually like as mothers.

We don’t know, so trying to pretend that somehow Ally Ryder has a mystic ball into the past and can witness these women with their kids is about as ridiculous as the latest episode of Most Haunted.

Mystic Ally have you any more predictions? What these woman were like at horse riding? Whether they might have taken to running marathons? Whether they were good cooks?

Yes lets condemn them now…the Victims of Jack the Ripper were all crap in the kitchen

Admit it you don't know and you have nothing to back your sweeping claims against these women.

Pirate

[Ally]

Pirate, I realize you are going to try to turn the subject from what these women chose to do, to what was done to ONE woman because you need some desperate hook to hang your hat on, but sorry I am not going to play that game.

How long a woman is in labor, has NOTHING to do with the type of mother she is. I can judge a mother by a very simple standard: Do they abandon their children or not? In the case of all of these women, they abandoned their children, their children wanted NOTHING to do with them and I think their own children are a better judge of their ability as a mother than you or even me. So I am going to go by Kate's children's opinion of her which was: bad mother. I am going to go by the facts: Annie and Polly abandoned their children in favor of the bottle. Bad mother.

Period.

[Jeff Leahy]

Your adding two and two together and coming up with four.

Lets try and make this more simple: A man is driving a car and has an accident.

Is he a bad driver?

The answer is obviously: We don’t know. We only know that he can drive and that he had a accident.

To make the conclusion he is a BAD driver is purely guess work. It is making assumption drawn on insufficient evidence.

Pirate

PS and there is no record of any of Kates children saying that Kate was a bad mother. FACT. You are making assumptions.

[Ally]

A better analogy is, a man has had his license revoked. Is he a bad driver? Yep. Or at least we know he committed enough infractions to be on a permanent ban.

When your children move to get away from you, it's pretty much a good indication you committed more than one infraction.

And yes, Leahy, usually when I add two plus two it turns out to be 4. Seeing as how that's rational.

[Cap'n Jack]

I think there are a couple of important points that should be made at this junction of confusion.
Firstly, during the period of the LVP which we discuss, children were forcibly removed from their parents and placed into care if evidence was provided that the mother or father were living on the proceeds of immoral earnings. I know for a fact that this rather unfair and certainly draconian law was used against at least one possible victim of the person we call Jack the Ripper, but I do suspect it was used against most of them.
I have actually followed the future of many such children taken into 'care' - including the children of the woman I mention above - and it was the norm for them to reach a certain age, run away from the 'care' home, and then either resort to prostitution, or as maids - placed there by the 'care' homes - become pregnant from the uninvited attention of their middle class employers.
It was a vicious circle, with the majority of the mothers having no other option than to resort to prostitution to feed their children, resulting in the removal of those children into 'care' homes, where they eventually emerged as either future prostitutes, or unwanted sexual objects in a gravid state whom nobody wanted, or cared for.
I personally would not be willing to pass judgement on a woman exposed to such a narrow choice when it came to providing for her children.
My second point is that I am rather baffled by what appears, on the part of some, to a hardening of attitude towards the victims of these horrendous murders, as if that is some kind of justification or excuse for the murder and mutilation of purely innocent women.
Am I dealing with the ghost of Colin Wilson here or what?

[Ally]

AP,

You are making a case that doesn't exist. None of these women resorted to prostitution to feed their children. They were all drunks who resorted to prostitution to feed their alcohol addiction. Their children were left in the care of others while they went off to booze themselves into oblivion.

[Jeff Leahy]

A better analogy is, a man has had his license revoked. Is he a bad driver? Yep. Or at least we know he committed enough infractions to be on a permanent ban.

When your children move to get away from you, it's pretty much a good indication you committed more than one infraction.

No it is NOT. You are continuing to make assumptions.

A man has his licence revoked. What we know is only that. He had his licence revoked..thats all we know...anything else is pure assumption.

We don't know why Kate's daughter refused to see her. There could be a million reasons, and probably were.

To say 'Kate was a bad mother' from this fact is assumption.

All we know is that see did stop seeing her mother and she said because mother was after money. Thats what we know. We dont know per se whether or not Kate was a bad mother. Certainly there is NO evidence on record that her sons ever beleived so..

Your guessing

Pirate

P.S. Thanks for trying to bring some historical perspective AP. Choices have to be seen in there context.

[Cap'n Jack]

So, Ally, if your middle class employer had raped you in the LVP, forcing you into the workhouse infirmary to give birth to a daughter that nobody wanted, what do you believe your level of care would have been for that poor child?
When your child was taken into 'care' shortly after birth, and you were slung out of the workhouse with no income whatsoever, what then would you have done to feed yourself?

[Ally]

AP,

None of the women we are talking about here had children by rape. Except for stride, who got pregnant through prostitution, we are talking about women who were in committed relationships, got pregnant and abandoned their families.

Scenarios that have NOTHING to do with the circumstance that you are describing. You can throw up every what if scenario :what if they were all impregnated by Satan and their children were really devil spawn: but we are actually looking at the FACTS of these particular womens lives. You are attempting to view them as some sort of symbol for all women in the LVP and hold them up as icons ascribing attributes to them that they do not possess.

Deal with the reality of these women and the reality is they had families that they tossed aside to drown themselves in the bottle.

[Jeff Leahy]

Ally that is precisely what we are trying to do.

We have already established that you are making assumptions.

Well to some extent that is OK. Its what Historians do, they take the known facts and try and draw a conclusion.

However once you start down the path of ASSUMPTION you are giving OPINION not FACT.

And once you start making ASSUMPTIONS then you need to start considering the context as a WHOLE.

So obviously the social reality of the place, time and period is extremely important to how we draw ASSUMPTION.

If we take what we know about Kate as a whole there is nothing to draw the conclusion that she was a particularly BAD person. In fact quite the opposite, as you can see from my earlier posts she was apparently well liked.

So we have contradiction, some good, some bad. What we do not have is any direct evidence that Kate was a ‘BAD MOTHER’. We must therefore draw on the circumstance of the environment in which she existed to form our conclusion.

AP’s background information gives us a window into the world that we are trying to understand. It was in places a hard and brutal world.

So trying to draw assumption based on 21st century values is pointless, it cant be done.

Pirate

[Ally]

I think attempting to excuse their behavior as typical and the norm for women of that time is insulting and misogynistic. I think it would appall the thousands and thousands of poor women of the LVP who didn't abandon their children and who didn't dive head first into a bottle to know that the standard by which they are judged is measured by the worst of them.

To say that the behavior or a drunken child abandoner is typical and the norm for that time is an insult to all the women who bore up under those hard circumstances and held the line.

And truly it is insight into your MALE disparaging minds, that you would excuse these women of the responsibility to their children because you don't believe that anything else could be expected of them.

[Jeff Leahy]

Again Ally you are making wilde accusations and drawing out there conclusions.

I also find it a little rich that you suddenly choose to draw the male misogynist card given that it is you that are destroying these women with sweeping one size fits all accusations. Yes they all drank. But this fact alone does not necessarily make them bad mothers. Yes they were all prostitutes, but are you trying to argue that any woman that becomes a prostitute by its very nature, they become a bad mother?

Pirate

[Ally]

I have said nothing whatsoever about them as prostitutes and mothers except that Stride became a mother via prostitution. Drinking doesn't make you a bad mother. Prostitution doesn' tmake you a bad mother.

Abandoning your children because you'd rather drink makes you a bad mother. And you are the one who insists on seeing these women as part of a collective rather than individuals. Not me. I have looked at each woman and individually found them wanting.

[Tom_Wescott]

Your adding two and two together and coming up with four.

I have not been able to read anything past this line. I'm still cracking up. If the argument wasn't lost long before this, I'd say this is pretty much Pirate's 'Jumping the Shark' moment. It was a good call bringing in the far more eloquent Cap'n Jack when he did.

Yours truly,

Tom Wescott

[Ally]

Paul Webb saves the day...but in this case no as AP's train derailed worse than Leahys.

I am still trying to figure out what my being raped by a middle class LVPer has to do with anything under discussion.