On a May morning in 1939, eighteen-year-old Velma Demerson and her lover were having breakfast when two police officers arrived to take her away. Her crime was loving a Chinese man, a “crime” that was compounded by her pregnancy and subsequent mixed-race child.
Sentenced to a home for wayward girls, Demerson was then transferred (along with forty-six other girls) to Torontos Mercer Reformatory for Females. The girls were locked in their cells for twelve hours a day and required to work in the on-site laundry and factory. They also endured suspect medical examinations. When Demerson was finally released after ten months’ incarceration weeks of solitary confinement, abusive medical treatments, and the state’s apprehension of her child, her marriage to her lover resulted in the loss of her citizenship status.
This is the story of how Demerson, and so many other girls, were treated as criminals or mentally defective individuals, even though their worst crime might have been only their choice of lover. Incorrigible is a survivor’s narrative. In a period that saw the rise of psychiatry, legislation against interracial marriage, and a populist movement that believed in eradicating disease and sin by improving the purity of Anglo-Saxon stock, Velma Demerson, like many young women, found herself confronted by powerful social forces. This is a history of some of those who fell through the cracks of the criminal code, told in a powerful first-person voice.

Velma Demerson was born in Vancouver. After her parents divorced, she lived in Toronto in a rooming house with her mother, who supported the family by managing the house and reading tea leaves in the parlour. When she was 18 Demerson was imprisoned for her relationship with a Chinese man. She won an apology and compensation from the Ontario government when she was in her 80s and wrote her book Incorrigible. Velma Demerson died in 2019.

 

Velma Demerson's profile page

Velma Demerson's story remains an inspiration to tackle obstacles, and a reminder that we're not alwasy as tolerant as we think we are.

The Barrister (Alberta Civil Trial Lawyers Association), Issue #79

Others have written about the origins of legislation like the Female Refuges Act, about criminal court process at the lower levels of the system, and about the ideologies and routines of prisons and reformatories. But it is rare indeed to find material about any of these things written from unofficial sources and so unremittingly from the point of view of those subjected to the law. If [Demerson's] account of the court hearings (if they can be called that) is at all accurate, they represent a complete railroading of the defendant....In a series of chapters Demerson also gives us an excellent, and harrowing, description of life at the Mercer....The subject which looms largest...and which unquestionably is most disturbing to the reader, is her account of the medical 'treatments' to which she was subjected.

Ricepaper

There is only one reaction to this sad story–a mixture of outrage, fury and shame.... Incorrigible, I believe, should be mandatory reading in every Women's Studies course in the land.

University of Toronto Quarterly, Letters in Canada

"Velma Demerson's new memoir, Incorrigible, recounts in horrifying detail being imprisoned in 1939 under the Female Refuges Act...It's a straightforward and at times brutally graphic account of her travails."

Saskatoon Star-Phoenix

Incorrigible describes in heart-rending detail the events leading up to the author's incarceration, her harrowing experiences while confined, her eventual release, and her relationship with her beloved son, Harry Yip. Demerson's powerful first-person account documents a shameful period in Canadian history, a time when outrageous abuses of power were committed in the name of social progress.

Canadian Woman Studies, Vol. 26 #1

Stories of rebels and outlaws have always been popular subjects for scholarly and popular histories. Those who have had their stories dramatized in plays, television shows, and on film, and even more so those who have published their memoirs, are overwhelmingly men. Here we see the memoir of a defiant woman in a moving account that could only have been a woman's life story. Historians interested in recovering the experiences of people without access to formal avenues of power typically search in vain for the sort of material presented in this book -- an insider's look at the regulation and punishment of working-class women who strayed from the moral scripts of gender and race.

The Globe and Mail

Any thinking person should be outraged by the issue raised by Ms. Demerson.

Maclean's

Demerson's spare, unadorned account of the injustice done her is moving and courageous.

Brian Bethune, Maclean's

Velma Demerson's new memoir, Incorrigible, recounts in horrifying detail being imprisoned in 1939 under the Female Refuges Act...It's a straightforward and at times brutally graphic account of her travails.

Canadian Book Review Annual 2006

There are few chapters in Canadian legal history as shameful as the Female Refuges Act. Targeting young women--often already marginalized by class and race''--for supposed immoral'' behaviour, the act ignored many basic principles of evidence and fair trial, leaving women at the mercy of a law profoundly shaped by sexist and racist assumptions. Women were incarcerated in correctional institutions, where they experienced a daily regime of shame and punishment. Velma Demerson's courageous battle to expose this blatant injustice should be commended. By offering her own story, she has done an immeasureable service that will hopefully sharpen public awareness of current injustices.

Joan Sangster, Trent University and author of <i>Girl Trouble: Female Delinquency in English Canada</i>

"Canada's political leaders like to tout our country's 'well-deserved reputation for tolerance.' They are less eager to discuss whether that reputation is wholly deserved....Based on the cruel and degrading experiences of Velma Demerson and other women imprisoned for 'vagrancy' or for simply being 'incorrigible,' Canada in the 1930s and 1940s was far less idyllic than what is portrayed in the history books....By bringing this disgraceful chapter of our history to light, Velma Demerson has demonstrated tremendous courage."

THIS Magazine

"Stories of rebels and outlaws have always been popular subjects for scholarly and popular histories. Those who have had their stories dramatized in plays, television shows, and on film, and even more so those who have published their memoirs, are overwhelmingly men. Here we see the memoir of a defiant woman in a moving account that could only have been a woman's life story. Historians interested in recovering the experiences of people without access to formal avenues of power typically search in vain for the sort of material presented in this book -- an insider's look at the regulation and punishment of working-class women who strayed from the moral scripts of gender and race."

Carolyn Strange, author of <i>Toronto's Girl Problem: The Perils and Pleasures of the City, 1880-1930</I> and co-author (with Tina Loo) of <I>True Crime, True North: The Golden Age of Canadian Pulp Magazines</i> (2004).