The squalid streets of Whitechapel and Spitalfields were often the only home of women who could not afford the few pennies a room in the doss-houses cost. pensions of very low category, with dirty and collective rooms that had to be paid for in advance.
At the time of their deaths, Mary Ann Nichols and Annie Chapman were looking for customers to pay for their room. Chapman carried all her belongings on her, as did all the women who feared being robbed while they slept or who spent the night on the street because they could not afford their accommodation. They had sex with their clients in the street, standing, in a discreet corner, and not in the privacy of a room. Prostitution was the only resource for these women whom no man supported and whose incomes were low and irregular:Annie Chapman sold flowers and crocheted works, Elizabeth Stride cleaned rooms, Catherine Eddowes returned from a collection of hops intended for the preparation of beer in Kent…
All shared the same distress. Nichols' husband had deserted her because of the drink; after their separation, Chapman's husband paid a pension to his wife, but he died; Stride's husband was also dead; Eddowes lived with a certain John Kelly in a boarding house which she left the night of her death, as she could not afford half the bed; after the death of her husband, Kelly regularly changed companions and, a few hours before her death, she chatted with the latest, Joseph Barnett, a fish carrier who was suspected of the crimes.
Bearing such a life was not easy. Everything pushed these women to sink into alcohol. Nichols, Chapman, Eddowes and Kelly were drunk the night they died (Eddowes, having passed out from drinking, had spent a few hours in a drunk tank). Loneliness, alcohol and the need to earn a few measly pennies to protect themselves from the cold and humidity of London made these women easy prey for the criminal on the prowl that was Jack the Ripper.