Incorrigible

Beryl Hamilton is a freelance writer in Thunder Bay who specializes in
home gardening.

In the spring of 1939 in Toronto, a pregnant 18-year-old woman named
Velma Demerson appeared before a judge to face the charge of
“incorrigibility.” Her sentence was one year’s confinement in a
brutal reformatory. Demerson’s crime was falling in love and
cohabiting with a Chinese man. At that time in Ontario, the Female
Refugees Act allowed women to be prosecuted for allegedly being “idle
and dissolute.” Along with other girls and young women who were
labelled as criminal or mentally defective, Demerson had to endure a
brutal incarceration that included forced participation in medical
experiments.

Demerson’s mixed-race son was born while she was confined. They were
released after months of shame, solitary confinement, and excruciating
acts of medical torture. Returning to freedom, Demerson faced a society
and a government that did not want to confront her interracial family.
Her Canadian citizenship was revoked because she had married a Chinese
man.

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.