There’s a new museum in London, and it promised to “retell the story of the East End through the eyes, voices, experiences and actions” of women and show their contribution to British history. Sounds promising!
Former Google diversity chief Mark Palmer-Edgecumbe, who is behind the scheme, promised “the first women’s museum in the UK” in plans given the green light by Tower Hamlets council last year.
But when the covers were removed from the site on Cable Street in Whitechapel last week, residents were shocked to find its subject matter had changed to the brutal unsolved murders of prostitutes between 1888 and 1891.
The Jack The Ripper Museum, which has as its logo a sinister silhouette of a man in Victorian dress above the museum name written in blood red, has outraged residents, who claim it is now about misogyny rather than women’s achievements.
But…but…he was a diversity chief. Shouldn’t you just trust his authority? After all, he’s clearly a master at explaining the significance of his museum to women.
Mr Palmer-Edgecumbe said:
We did plan to do a museum about social history of women but as the project developed we decided a more interesting angle was from the perspective of the victims of Jack the Ripper.
It is absolutely not celebrating the crime of Jack the Ripper but looking at why and how the women got in that situation in the first place.
Those East End women. How ever did they get in that situation in which a vicious murderer butchered and eviscerated them? Let’s discuss how it’s women’s fault that they’re prone to getting slaughtered by deranged serial killers.
And don’t forget how big a draw exhibiting lurid crime scene photos of mutilated women can be!
It’s still true what the museum claims to do, as long as we appreciate that the includes lying quietly dead while a maniac rifles through their organs.
“more interesting…” to whom?
Oh, right, this museum was to be about women, but for men. That’s “more interesting” to whom.
Ordinary women’s experiences are boooooooring.
I got a really horrible victim-blamey vibe from that, too.
You really had me going there for a while. That sounded like a fascinating museum for a moment. Until the unveiling.
Don’t get me wrong. I am fascinated by the macabre history of Jack the Ripper and other serial killers. But does the world really need another museum about it? Does London? And what story is there to tell from the woman’s angle? It has nothing to do with the history of women in the east end of London in Victorian times, only the history of things _done_ to women in the east end of London in Victorian times.
Not only a failure, but a bizarre failure.
If it was really the “how and why ” this museum would either be exceptionally boring (‘they existed, the end’), or infuriating to many men as it discusses in depth misogyny, and patriarchal attitudes of the times.
I see he is bravely testing the hypothesis that victim blaming is fine if the victims are dead long enough. They took a museum about women and instead gave us the Rape Culture Museum featuring good ol’ Jack the Ripper. Fantastic. These people should all be ashamed of themselves.
Fucking fuckheads can fuck off with all the fucks, is my opinion.
Places you might visit instead:
Women’s Rights National Historic Park
National Women’s Hall of Fame
both in Seneca Falls, New York, USA
National Women’s History Museum
Alexandria, Virginia, USA
Because Jack the Ripper hasn’t already been done to death in virtually every medium for the last hundred years, oh no.
Also, the East End of London has been fetishised and explored and interpreted and represented and discussed far more than anywhere else in London, and London far more than anywhere else in the UK. We’re all sick to death of London by now, particularly its East End, thanks to the egregious myopia of its residents and their pathological inability to shut up about the place. There are far more interesting places in our islands that have not been given the limelight before.
Why not a museum looking at women’s contributions to Dorset fishing villages in the 18th century? or the towns of the industrial north in the 19th? Or the port of Bristol in the 17th? Or the Highlands of Scotland in the 15th? Or the Welsh marches in the 12th? Or even the ethnic minority women in London since the 1950s, if you simply have to stick with London because the people who live there refuse to believe there’s anywhere else worth learning about.
Sounds like he figured some shallow edutainment would draw in bigger crowds. I guess his blatant disregard is quite misogynistic, but above all I think he’s just a greedy hack who smelled an opportunity for cash when he considered the general interest in prostitutes and bloody murder.
And here I was, thinking that I did need to read past the first paragraph.
I read up to “promised to “retell the story of the East End through the eyes, voices, experiences and actions” of women” and the first thing that sprang to mind was murders.
How does that show their contribution to history? Seriously, are they saying that the only historical contributions that women in the East End have made were being murdered over three years toward the back end of the 19th century? Fucking hell…
I mean, sure, ok, that’s obviously not what they’re explicitly saying by opening a Ripper museum, but when the sales pitch is the contributions of women to British history, and the product is about women being murdered, it’s kind of hard not to take that message away.
Surely there are enough Ripper museums out there anyway? Is it really so much to ask that a place sold as a women’s museum might actually give us some insights into historical women beyond the same stuff that’s almost universally known? Even if that really is so much to ask, could we not at least have cases where the women had some agency in events, whose historical significance goes beyond having been murdered by a famous man? I don’t know of any specifically East End women through history, but what about Elizabeth Fulhame, Emily Blackwell, or Mary Wollstonecraft, to name just three more appropriate subjects for a women’s museum than a man who murdered women?
Oh, by the way, also from the article, two points. First, please note that the museum was originally about the Women of East End.
Point One:
They had ideas, and pitched the museum based on those ideas, of some actual elements of actual women’s history to actually portray. It can’t plead ignorance, claiming they had no idea what they could possibly portray out of women’s history for their museum.
Point Two:
So basically, not only did they ditch the pretense of making the museum about women, they also gave up the pretense of making it about East End/Cable Street either. They could have kept their original concept, they could have just made it about women, they could have just made it about Cable Street, but instead they decided to be sensationalist and misogynistic with the decision to turn a museum about the history of women in East End, and making it about a serial killer killing prostitutes somewhere close enough to East End.
I hate humans.
Stuff like this makes me wonder ifperhaps Jack the Ripper’s contemporaries weren’t LESS misogynistic than the goblins who created this exhibit.
Of course, correcting myself a little, I think that, rather than having a museum that focusses on a small number of famous women, it would’ve been good if they’d gone for one that looks at the general state of life for women in that area through history. Surely there are enough artefacts and written records to make that kind of thing covering a couple of centuries?
Saganite @ 11:
Indeed. It’s women, though, who understand that the continued interest in terribly abused and mutilated women continues to foster misogyny. That would be why a museum dealing with the history and contributions by women would have been so very welcome, because that makes people realize that women are indeed human beings, not simply articles to be used and tossed away.
(Sorry, mistake of London geography: Cable Street is in Whitechapel which is in the East End of London. For some reason I thought East End and Cable St. were being used as synonyms).
Which at first led me to think they planned to focus on Jack’s victims, in order to humanize them out of the simple victimhood they are often portrayed as.
Then:
which I read as “victimblaming” of Jack’s horrific actions.
@anteprepro,
They pretty much straight up lied about the purpose of the museum to get permits and then did a sick and twisted switcheroo. Just awful. Hope this museum falters and goes out of business with a quickness. It will do nothing but exploit the murders of women.
This made me laugh with its ridiculousness.
the general interest in prostitutes and bloody murder
Bloody extremely sexualized woman-hating murder.
Cartomancer @10, it wouldn’t have been unreasonable for a London museum to focus on London, if they had done it properly. Other UK cities have their own centers for aspects of women’s history:
http://www.history.ac.uk/ihr/Focus/Gender/resources.html
We’ve already got The London Dungeon, ffs (for those who want a little trip to Gore!World). And as cartomancer rightly points out, a massive, massive glut of books, TV, articles, waxworks and I don’t know what-all else about JtR.
We could have had the history of women’s changing social role and women’s sufferage, we could have had the history of the many waves of immigration that have centred on the East End since the Huguenots (and probably before; what do I know? Not a lot) … and we’re getting Gore!World mk II, now with even more extra added misogyny???
This is the sound of a million wasted opportunities. Being wasted.
Go to the Whitechapel Gallery instead.
What a wasted of opportunity. Considering the current rather unpleasant anti-immigration streak that seems to be running through sections of the British political establishment, there is a very timely topic waiting to be explored by a museum located on Cable Street.
The Battle of Cable Street.
On Sunday October 4th, 1936 Oswald Mosely and his British Union of Fascists (also known as blackshirts, after the political uniform they wore) held a march in the East End of London. The marchers were escorted by the Metropolitan Police and opposed by as many as 100,000 counter-demonstrators. The area had a large immigrant community (and still does) and many from the local community, as well as Irish, Jewish, communist and anarchist groups managed to overwhelm the police and marchers and stop the provocative rally.
Changes to the law, which were introduced after the Battle of Cable Street, are thought likely to have contributed to the decline of the British Union of Fascists.
If you want to learn about women in the East End, Call the Midwife is a good place to start, and it has been hugely popular as both a book and a TV series on both sides of the pond. Why didn’t he make his museum about that, at least as a beginning theme?
It made me cry with its ridiculousness.
Bait-and-switchery; pitch one product to get ’em in the door, and stock an inferior product in its place.
–
Clearly, diversity chief:diversity::fire chief:fire.
@25: Indeed, Call The Midwife, only wider in scope and era (and they probably could even have worked a publicity tie-in — Come see Poplar when Sister Monica Joan was just a novitiate!). Instead, as observed above, it’s just a lurid attraction on a theme that’s been done a hundred times.
Has the entire world lost the meaning between telling the truth and just saying shit because you just want to do what you want to do anyway? How the hell can a museum about social history of women turn into “The Jack the Ripper Museum” and who the fuck could possible think yet another Jack the Ripper Museum be more interesting? It’s like proposing a museum for the study of the gulf currents in the caribean and their influence economically and environmentally upon the urban centers of the southern coastal United States and then deciding on the more interesting angle about the filming of the television show “Flipper”.
I mean, Jesus, is this guy even speaking English?
@Reginald Selkirk #9,
Don’t bother coming to Alexandria, Virginia to visit the National Women’s History Museum, as you’d only find an office there for those lobbying for that museum to be built on the National Mall in DC.
My jaw dropped at the depth of this vile dumbfuckery.
So I said I was going to build a museum about women, but in order to be interesting it has to be about a man. So I fixed it.
Right.
Also, women are ciphers. They only exist when a man is present.
To counter this fuckery, I thought I’d mention that I was recently looking at some historical photos for the town I live in (Nuneaton) and was happy to find some interesting snaps of women working: http://www.nuneatonhistory.com/uploads/1/8/6/8/18680466/7853864_orig.jpg That was on my street in 1960, a brick and tile factory that employed women
http://www.nuneatonhistory.com/uploads/1/8/6/8/18680466/7160809_orig.jpg A scientist! In 1950 checking the coal mined in the area for quality.
http://www.nuneatonhistory.com/uploads/1/8/6/8/18680466/7343835.jpg?241 A player and the lineswomen of the Nuneaton women’s football team in the 1950’s :D
http://www.nuneatonhistory.com/uploads/1/8/6/8/18680466/2893076_orig.jpg Women working the machinery of Courtaulds Factory
http://www.nuneatonhistory.com/uploads/1/8/6/8/18680466/8200346_orig.jpg A shopkeep standing proudly in the doorway of her workplace, with her children.
http://www.nuneatonhistory.com/uploads/1/8/6/8/18680466/1001287.jpg?1365711801 Captioned with: Nuneaton Market Place in the 1930’s. At one time there were eleven pubs within the immediate area of the Market Place seen here but now there is only one. One of the oldest remaining can be seen on the left – The White Swan which for many years was kept by a formidable landlady – Harriet Platt.
So already this website on the general history of the area has shown more meaningful womens history without even specifically focusing on it.