Overview

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 in 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.

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9780889204447

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Reviews

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

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

Author Information

Velma Demerson is a widow, and mother of three children - the first child, the son of her interracial marriage, died at age twenty-six. She has worked throughout her life in a variety of positions, mostly as a secretary for governments (provincial and federal) and lawyers. She is self-educated. This is her first book.

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