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 Toronto's 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.
