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Velma Demerson
Plight of 'incorrigible'
women demands justice
by Michele Landsberg, Sunday
Star, May 6 2001
Formal government apologies
for historic state crimes have always seem a hollow gesture to
me. Words of regret are cheap. But, on the other hand, when the
government has imposed cruel and arbitrary suffering on a large
group of its citizens, how can those people attain a sense of
justice?
Take the case of Velma Demerson,
now 80. I knew, but had forgotten until Demerson reminded me,
that for nearly 70 years, until 1964, the province of Ontario
arrested and jailed, without trial or appeal, girls and women
between the ages of 16 and 35 whom a magistrate deemed to be
"incorrigible". You needed only to be female, poor
and sexually active to qualify for arbitrary punishment inflicted
by male authorities in the name of "protection". (
Lower class boys weren't punished for sex; they were deemed incorrigible
only for theft).
It was spring, 1939 and the
Depression still lingered. Velma was 17 and living in her mother's
rooming house on Church St. across from Maple Leaf Gardens. "My
mother liked excitement," Velma says dryly. "She was
English, divorced from my father, a Greek businessman in New
Brunswick, and she told fortunes by reading tea leaves."
Velma, a pretty blonde teenager, was tired of the fights, the
uproar and the bedbugs in her mother's rooming house. Soon after
she fell in love with the handsome young Chinese waiter at the
Commodore Restaurant, she discovered the "quiet escape"
of his room on Walton St. He gave her the key, bought her a pair
of Chinese slippers and soon, the two were living together.
Velma's father came storming
to Toronto, determined to separate the pair. "He felt his
reputation was at stake," Velma says. By now, Velma was
18, rapturously in love ("I used to go through Harry's clothes
while he was at work and just, oh my dear, smell them!"
she exclaimed) and planning on marriage.
She and Harry were in their
pajamas one morning when the police, led by her father ( "That's
her!" he barked) burst in the door. It was the last she
would see Harry for more than a year. By the time they were rejoined,
her life was permanently embittered and their relationship doomed
by circumstance.
Velma was taken to "Women's
Court" at City Hall where a social worker questioned her.
Velma made three strategic mistakes. When she was asked how many
men she had slept with, she tried to protect Harry from accusations
of seducing her by falsely saying "Two". And then,
thinking that impending motherhood might save her, she blurted
out that she was pregnant. The social worker immediately slammed
her file shut and left the room. Taken before Judge Robert Browne,
Velma, in her innocence, made one last error. "Just let
me out and I'll marry him!" she begged.
She didn't know that "promiscuity",
being "illegitimately" pregnant, and consorting willingly
with a Chinese man, were all grounds for imprisonment under the
Female Refuges Act of 1897. Indeed, anyone at all could charge
a woman aged 16 to 35 with being "dissolute" under
the Act, and she could be packed off to serve years as a laundress
or seamstress in a church-run "refuge" or reform school.
In less than an hour, with
no trial, lawyer or due process, Velma was remanded one week
for sentencing. She spent the week sleeping on a bench in the
Don Jail. Brought back to court, she was told by Browne that
she was to serve one year in the Belmont Home for "incorrigibility".
The Belmont Home, now a swanky
retirement residence in midtown Toronto,, was then an "industrial
refuge" for incorrigible girls, run as a commercial laundry
by the Protestant church. But only six weeks after Velma's arrival,
the money-losing laundry was shut down and the 47 young women
inmates were transferred, many of them weeping in terror, to
the notorious Mercer Reformatory.
On arrival at Mercer, the women
were issued a bundle of ill-fitting clothes (huge skirts, cotton
stockings) and locked up in barred, windowless cells with an
enamel bucket to serve as toilet.
"There were no clocks,
so we never knew the time, and no newspapers. We were forbidden
to talk. We had to walk in strict lines to the sewing machines,
and to the dining room. They purposely broke up any friendships."
Velma Demerson, who looks 20
years younger than her age, speaks with clarity, intelligence
and restraint. She doesn't embroider. When she says that the
frequent gynecological examinations in prison were abusive, she
clamps her mouth shut and says no more. The young women, many
of them pregnant, were forced to line up and watch the pelvic
exams until it was their turn.
It is clear that Velma deliberately
numbed herself to the horror she was living through, including
her lonely childbirth, an abortive attempt to escape from the
maternity ward (clad in hospital gown and a bedsheet), and the
months back in prison when her baby boy spent the days on a "sleeping
porch" while Velma laboured in the sewing factory.
One day, her baby was gone,
"removed to hospital" as she was laconically informed.
She knew nothing more till she retrieved him after her release.
When Velma was discharged early
after nine months, she didn't even smile at the news. Not until
the matron brought her her street clothes. "When I put on
my own silk stockings, then I knew I was free."
In telling me her complicated,
painful story, Velma lost her composure only once, when describing
how she walked away from Mercer Reformatory, suitcase in hand,
and stopped to look back. She covered her eyes at the grim memory.
"I never talked about it again, until now," she said.
The frightening incarceration
and the alienation of her feelings took a long-lasting toll on
Velma's life. Although she was reunited with Harry, their marriage
--- tormented by the baby's severe eczema and asthma, and the
lack of money for his medicines --- lasted only a couple of years.
Harry Jr. had a difficult, disrupted childhood, and drowned at
the age of 26.
"I want justice,"
Velma says now, sitting up straight, tiny and fiercely determined.
"I was estranged from my family to this day. I'm on the
books as guilty, and so are the other girls. Some of them lost
their babies."
Velma Demerson and the thousands
of other women who were criminalized because of their sexuality
are certainly owed some form of redress.
As for the rest of us, we should
remain alert to the potential for terrible harm and abuse when
men in power pass laws to "protect" girls and women.
A dark passage in Ontario's
past
By MICHAEL VALPI, Globe
and Mail, March 22, 2002
On the morning of May 3, 1939,
18-year-old Velma Demerson, three months pregnant and wearing
her pyjamas, was sitting down for breakfast with the man she
planned to marry when there was a loud banging at the door.
In came two Toronto police
officers, followed by her father. "Is this her?" one
of the officers asked. "That's her," her father said.
In the hour that followed,
Ms. Demerson was arrested, driven to a courthouse lockup, placed
in a barred cage, questioned about how many times she had had
sex and with whom and taken before a magistrate who remanded
her in custody in what she thinks was Toronto's Don Jail.
A week later, the magistrate
ordered her incarcerated for "incorrigibility" for
one year in Belmont House, formally known as the Toronto Industrial
Refuge (and now an elegant retirement residence). She subsequently
was transferred to the grim Mercer Reformatory for Women.
Her crime: living with a Chinese
man, Harry Yip.
Ms. Demerson, now 81, has worked
for years to unearth the records of her incarceration. She recently
found an internal government memo warning the attorney-general
of the time that incarcerating women under the act was possibly
an illegal constitutional intrusion into federal criminal justice
jurisdiction.
She is now suing the Ontario
government for unauthorized imprisonment.
Last night, the Ontario New
Democratic Party gave her its annual J. S. Woodsworth Award for
making a significant contribution to ending racial discrimination.
Ms. Demerson recalled in an
interview the events of that year -- a chronicle of official
social control of women's lives that a historian who has studied
her case and others calls "a horror story."
Hundreds of Ontario women were
imprisoned, like Ms. Demerson, under the provincial Female Refuges
Act, which stated that "any parent or guardian may bring
before a judge any female under the age of 21 years who proves
unmanageable or incorrigible."
The act was not repealed until
1958.
So-called houses of refuge
were church-run institutions for women and youths deemed incorrigible.
Belmont House's annual report described it as a refuge for feeble-minded
women.
The institution was unexpectedly
closed six weeks after Ms. Demerson arrived, and she and other
inmates secretly were transferred to the Mercer Reformatory,
now the site of the Allan Lamport soccer stadium on King Street
West.
For the next seven months she
operated a sewing machine, worked in the dining hall and slept
in a windowless, one-by-two-metre cell. She had to submit to
an internal examination in a room with other women. She was sexually
abused by a staff member. She was allowed to speak only half
an hour a day. She was not allowed writing materials, a clock
or newspapers.
Because of the sexual assaults,
when she was sent to Toronto General Hospital to give birth she
escaped, wearing only a sheet. Her mother talked her into going
back, and Ms. Demerson returned to the reformatory with her infant
son.
She told of heading as usual
for the jail nursery one morning only to be told by a matron
that her child had been taken to hospital. She was given no explanation.
She didn't see him for several weeks.
Ms. Demerson was let out after
nine months -- released early because the King and Queen were
visiting Toronto.
Historian Joan Sangster of
Trent University says the legislation targeted young working-class
women who had sexual liaisons with non-white men.
Lawyer Jill Copeland, who studied
the act, says the provision requiring judges to "make reasonable
enquiry" into the truth of allegations of incorrigibility
was seldom observed.
Ms. Demerson married Mr. Yip,
but the marriage ended in divorce three years later. She said
that her son was subjected to constant racist insults. He drowned
at the age of 26.
Copyright © 2002 Bell
Globemedia Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Woman wants apology 60
years after being jailed under archaic Ontario law
ANDREA BAILLIE. Canadian
Press, October 07,
2002
TORONTO (CP) - More than 60
years after being thrown in jail for living with her Chinese
boyfriend, a Toronto woman is demanding an apology from the Ontario
government. "I've always had this in the back of my mind,"
Velma Demerson, 81, told a news conference, flanked by supporters.
She was arrested while living
with her boyfriend, Harry Yip, whom she planned to marry.
"They took me in this
car, two policemen, down to the courthouse . . and put me in
a cell there," she recalled Monday.
"A social worker came
to see me and took me into a room and asked me how many men I'd
slept with."
She was ultimately found guilty
under the Female Refuges Act of 1897 and put in jail for about
10 months.
Until it was repealed in 1964,
the law allowed women from age 16 to 35 to be jailed for behaviour
such as public drunkenness, promiscuity and pregnancy out of
wedlock.
Demerson, who gave birth in
prison and later had her baby taken away from her, says the act
has left many women living in shame.
"There are women out there
who think they did something wrong; their relatives think they
did something wrong," she said. "These women need to
know that they didn't do anything w rong."
Demerson ultimately married
her boyfriend and was reunited with her child. Her marriage lasted
three years and her son died in the 1960s in an accident.
She remained haunted by her
time in prison, and about twelve years ago began the process
of obtaining her personal records.
In April 2002, she launched
a lawsuit claiming $11 million in damages. An Ontario Superior
Court judge has since ruled that the provincial government is
immune to lawsuits stemming from incidents before 1963.
That decision is currently
under appeal and Demerson wants to participate in the case so
her own can go forward.
"It was a really racist
society," she said. "We hadn't committed any offence."
A spokesman for Ontario's Ministry
of the Attorney General refused to comment on the case Monday,
saying it is still before the courts.
But supporters of Demerson
who attended the news conference are pushing to have the case
go ahead, and say she deserves an apology from the province.
"(Velma) was amongst thousands
of young women who were made victims by their own government,"
said NDP justice critic Peter Kormos.
© Copyright 2002 The
Canadian Press
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Truth can never be
told so as to be understood, and not be believ'd. William Blake, The Proverbs of Hell
