Painted Women
For centuries, many women have been negatively portrayed and misrepresented in the nation’s history. Being labeled as unfit mothers, prostitutes, or deemed unstable, the women are either painted over or painted wrong.
In an artwork at the National Maritime Museum, women are literally being painted over by artists to be replaced by with men. The oil painting called, “Greenwich Pensioners”, painted by Henry James Pidding, depicts a group of pensioners outside a chapel. The name of the original painting was called, “An Old Tar Doing Penance for His Devotion to Jolly Bacchus”. The description talks about alcohol and what reparations would have been made for public intoxication. If one was drunk on a Sunday, one had to wear a yellow coat to indicate that he violated a rule. The man in the center of the painting is an example of a “canary”, someone who wears the punishment coat. The group of 3 men, to the left of the yellow-coated man, is not from the original piece. Instead, the painter had originally painted 2 milkmaids to depict his initial intention of “alcohol and sexual desires”, but after changing his mind, Pidding painted over the women and replaced them with the group of men. When looking at the painting, the other characters can be seen slyly giving glances to the group of men, since there was initially a group of women where the men are standing. This would indicate that the men would have been gawking at the women, and while the men would clearly be to blame for objectifying, and perhaps harassing the innocent milkmaids, it is the women who are removed from the painting.
The act of painting over these women erases their part in art and history.
After going on a Jack-the-Ripper Tour in the East End of London, I found a book that attempted to re-write the wrongs that the victims had faced: loss of their story. The tour guide took us through the different streets and buildings where the 5 women victims were found or places that they had frequented. He briefly described the victims, writing them off as prostitutes who met their tragic end. Hallie Rubenhold, a social historian, tracked down each of the 5 women’s stories and recounted their lives from birth until right up to the moment that they were murdered. The book, “The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack The Ripper” explains the ways in which their stories were altered by the newspapers, in an effort to sell more and be more successful, a problem still dealt with today. She goes on to correct what was written about the women and to describe that only one of the women was a prostitute, the rest were labeled as such because they all had the commonality of a bad reputation. During that time period, if a woman had a failed marriage, a child out of wed lock (whether it was by choice or force), or if a woman struggled from alcoholism, often times they ended up on the streets. In the East End, this was almost guaranteed, considering it had some of the highest rates of violence and poverty. All of the 5 women ended up on the street by similar fate. Once a woman was on the street, it was easy to label her as a prostitute, even if that wasn’t the case. In one of the circumstances, one of the victim’s friends insisted that the woman wasn’t a prostitute, but the newspaper altered the statement to fit what they knew the viewers wanted to see. Rubenhold wrote the book to show that these women were more than Jack-the-Ripper victims, but rather wives, mothers, daughters, and friends who worked as servants, owned coffee shops, etc. The women’s stories were painted, unlike the women in the painting, but it was still just as invisible and damaging.
The oil painting in the National Maritime Museum and the 5 victims of Jack-the-Ripper both represent times in history when several women’s lives and efforts have been misrepresented or erased altogether. While Hallie Rubenhold attempts to give the women-victims their stories back, the women that were covered up in the painting, and many others, will never receive the same justice.
