There was a knock at the door. It came on a quiet spring morning in 1939. Velma Demerson and her fiancé, Harry, were having breakfast in their apartment downtown. Right up until that moment, it seemed as if she was about to begin a wonderful new life. She was eighteen years old, engaged to be married to the man she loved, looking forward to their wedding day and to the baby they had on the way. They were happy and in love.
But that was all about to change. When they opened the door, they found Velma’s father standing on the other side — along with the police. They’d come to arrest her.
Velma was led out of her apartment and into the back of a waiting police car. She would spend the next week living behind the bars of a jail cell with nothing but a wooden bench to sleep on. She would be questioned about her religion, about her past relationships, and about her sexual history. She told them everything they wanted to know. All she was hoping to do, she told them, was to return home, marry her fiancé, and begin their life together as a family. It seemed like such a modest request. “She loves him,” she heard one police officer ask another. “Why won’t they let her marry him?” And yet, still, she languished in jail.
Demerson was scared and alone. Her parents refused to visit her, and it was far too dangerous for Harry to come. “The separation from my fiancé consumes me,” she wrote. “I imagine I see him at every turn.” As the days passed, she began to despair. In her bleakest moments, she even began to hope for a miscarriage.
Finally, at the end of that lonely week, Demerson was brought to trial. It didn’t last long. She was found guilty, convicted of being “incorrigible,” and given a one-year sentence. Her crime was simple: Velma Demerson was a white woman who had fallen in love with a Chinese Canadian man.
It was a dropped fork that brought them together. Demerson was out for dinner with her fortune-teller mother and some friends — one of the rare joyful occasions during those hard years of the Great Depression. It was fun. They were laughing, eating, and drinking. There was a hint of excitement in the air.
The first time she accidentally dropped her fork, the waiter picked it up for her. The second time, there he was again. He was quite attractive, she thought, in his waiter’s white shirt and tie. So, when he asked her out, she said yes.
Everyone there assumed they were joking. But the very next day, Demerson headed back to the restaurant to meet Harry Yip for their first date. They hung out at his place — a modest room on the third floor of an old house near Yonge Street — drinking vermouth out of whisky glasses, smoking, and chatting until he had to go back to work. As he rose to leave, he asked if he could kiss her. She said yes.
They spent a year together, taking walks on summer days, visiting the best restaurants in Chinatown, or hanging out alone in his apartment. They both felt like outsiders: he was a Chinese immigrant; her parents were divorced, and her father was Greek. That was enough to leave them both ostracized in such a conservative town. “Maybe that’s what attracts us to each other,” she suggested in her autobiography. “My fiancé and I are lonely people who have found each other. We share the same enemies.”
By the spring of 1939, they had a plan: it didn’t matter what their families thought; they would elope and spend the rest of their lives together. But there was a costly hiccup. Yip was a gambler. And when he lost all his money, they were forced to delay those plans. She didn’t blame him; she was confident they’d get married as soon as they could. But that’s when the knock came at the door.
The 1930s were an incredibly difficult time for anyone who fell in love with someone who didn’t look like them. The decade opened with an attack on an interracial couple by the Ku Klux Klan. It was carried out in Oakville — just outside Toronto. A mob of seventy-five men in white hoods burned a cross in the middle of a downtown street and a second outside the couple’s home, dragging them off in separate cars and warning them that if they were ever seen together again, the Klan would be back. The mayor of Oakville responded by praising the KKK. “Personally, I think the Ku Klux Klan acted quite properly in the matter,” he told the Toronto Star. “The feeling in the town is generally against such a marriage. Everything was done in an orderly manner. It will be quite an object lesson.” Only one man was ever convicted for the attack. He got three months in jail.
Meanwhile, the federal government had a policy of official racism toward Chinese immigrants. The Chinese Exclusion Act banned nearly all Chinese people from moving to Canada. In a quarter century, only fifteen Chinese immigrants were accepted into Canada. And those Chinese Canadians who were already in the country faced terrible prejudice. In Toronto, just as in cities across Canada, Chinese men were demonized and accused of corrupting white women, even of luring them into the sex industry. Toronto police were known to arrest white women just for being found inside a Chinese restaurant at night. And much of the city’s first Chinatown in The Ward would disappear as the community was driven out of businesses and homes in order make way for a new city hall.
Demerson wasn’t about to let racism stop her, however. “I know that going out with a Chinese man is socially unacceptable,” she wrote. “There may be disapproving looks from passersby, but I don’t care. It’s the first time I look forward with such eagerness to a date.” But she would soon learn just how much hatred could be found in Toronto. It wasn’t just disapproving looks.
The Ontario government had passed a law called the Female Refuges Act. It gave anyone the power to have a woman under thirty-five brought in front of a judge for “leading an idle and dissolute life.” Parents could drag their daughters into court, too; if they were under twenty-one and the judge agreed they were “unmanageable or incorrigible,” women could be institutionalized. The law was frequently used to punish them for their sexual choices. And in Toronto, living with a Chinese Canadian man and being pregnant with his child provided plenty of grounds for a conviction.
That’s how Velma Demerson found herself at the Andrew Mercer Reformatory for Women.
It was an ominous sight. A gothic mountain of red brick rising up from King Street. A tall steeple towered above the main entrance; turrets rose from both wings. At first glance, it might have seemed like a private school or a university building, but this was a more sombre, foreboding place. If you looked closely, you could see bars on the windows. Demerson would remember it as “a dark formidable fortress pencilled black against the white sky.”
By the time she arrived, the Andrew Mercer Reformatory for Women was already more than half a century old. It was the first women’s prison to open anywhere in Canada. The Mercer was home to a mix of women incarcerated for a wide variety of offences: everything from murder to drunkenness to being a pregnant teenager who’d fallen in love with the wrong man.
This is where Demerson would spend the next nine months of her life, locked away inside a tiny cell behind iron bars with little more than a wire cot and a pail for a toilet. The room was barely big enough to lie down. Demerson, like the other inmates, spent twelve hours a day confined inside her cell, forbidden from talking to her neighbours, not even allowed to lie down until bedtime when the bare bulb in the ceiling would finally be turned off.
“I never become used to my cell,” she wrote. “Each morning I open my eyes and feel despair. Drab grey and hard surfaces have replaced the colour and texture of former surroundings.”
Many of the brief hours she was allowed to spend outside her cell were filled with work. The Mercer was founded on the idea that labour would help reform “fallen” women. Demerson was assigned to a half-broken sewing machine, expected to work in silence for nine hours a day while earning less than a cent an hour. She made a grand total of six dollars during her entire stay.
“It’s becoming horribly clear,” she wrote, “that my life is forfeit to a still unknown but punitive monster — the state. All movement, all time, even my very thoughts are being consumed. I feel naked, shamed, and defenseless.”
Worse still was the medical “care” she received.
Dr. Edna Guest was a respected physician: a pioneer in her field. She’d graduated from medical school at the University of Toronto back in 1910 — a time when only three of the hundred and fifty graduates were women. She did her postgraduate studies at Harvard, was a missionary professor in India, and served as a doctor on the Western Front during the First World War. In Toronto, she co-founded Women’s College Hospital. She would eventually be named to the Order of the British Empire. To this day, McMaster University gives out an annual athletic award named in her honour. An avid feminist, cancer researcher, and campaigner against venereal disease, she’d been overseeing the medical treatment at the Mercer for nearly twenty years. But she was interested in more than just her patients’ health.
Dr. Guest was a passionate supporter of eugenics. She believed strongly in the idea that “undesirable” citizens should be sterilized, while the most successful should be encouraged to procreate, leading to the creation of a stronger race. Canada was about to fight a war to end that kind of thinking in Nazi Germany, but for the moment there were still plenty of respected Canadians who believed in it — including celebrated feminist pioneers like Nellie McClung and Emily Murphy, and the champion of public health care, Tommy Douglas. Both Alberta and British Colombia had passed laws allowing patients in mental health institutions to be sterilized against their will.
Only a few weeks after she arrived at the Mercer, Demerson fell under Dr. Guest’s knife. Her treatment was excruciatingly painful. Without being told what was happening or what she was being treated for, her groin was cut open with scissors; she believed the wounds were cauterized with acid. Week after week, she was brought back to have the procedures performed again. In between, she was kept in solitary confinement. Her fear only grew stronger as her groin turned black.
In the face of such torture, even Yip became a fading memory. “Love, now so distant,” Demerson wrote, “appears to me as a luxurious fantasy compared to my life of physical fear.… I don’t think about my fiancé anymore; my loyalties have dissolved in a sea of turmoil. I am still in shock. I will never think of sexuality.… My environment has taken over my entire being — there is no spirituality, no romance, only pragmatism.”
It wasn’t until many decades later that she would finally understand what happened. According to Demerson’s autobiography, Dr. Guest was using the patients at the Mercer as unwilling subjects in her medical experiments. The doctor believed “incorrigible” behaviour in women was caused by overactive sex glands. If she could prove it, she would prove that women weren’t inherently inferior, as so many men claimed — just those with the faulty glands. The doctor thought she was advancing the cause of equality.
It was in the middle of these horrifying experiments that Demerson went into labour.
She was taken to Toronto General Hospital to give birth. It went well: she had a bouncing baby boy she would name Harry Yip Jr. But she was terrified by the prospect of returning to the Mercer and its medical experiments. So, she seized her opportunity to escape.
She fled the hospital in the dead of night, escaping out the delivery entrance, running toward Bay Street in nothing but her hospital gown, slippers, and a sheet she’d wrapped around herself. Getting a ride from a stranger, she discovered her fiancé wasn’t home. She had little choice but to go to her mother for help.
Her mom hadn’t visited her in the hospital; she was so offended by Demerson’s relationship she couldn’t bring herself to meet her grandson. And when her daughter arrived at her doorstep in the middle of the night, begging for help, pleading with her to save her from the Mercer, she refused.
Demerson would be forced to return to her house of horrors, so desperate she used a pair of scissors to stab herself in the stomach. If only, she thought, she could injure herself enough to get sent back to the hospital, she would win a little more time outside the reformatory. It didn’t work. But the end of her sentence, thankfully, was beginning to draw near. The day would come when she was finally released and allowed to return to the outside world — and to the man she loved.
They were married not long after she was released. It wasn’t a particularly celebratory occasion. They simply brought a couple of friends with them to a church and had a Chinese Protestant minister perform the cere ony. Demerson didn’t wear a wedding dress; Yip headed right back to work after they signed the register. It was more practical than anything else. Demerson still wasn’t twenty-one years old. They worried she might get arrested again if they didn’t get married right away. But at least they could finally be together. The little family settled into a second-floor apartment on Gerrard Street, just a few blocks from Chinatown, with a small balcony looking out over the sidewalk.
Their life wasn’t an easy one. It took them a while to get custody of Harry Jr. He’d been taken away from his mother and admitted to the Hospital for Sick Children for treatment of asthma and chronic eczema. No one had told them where he was or why he had been taken away. And while Demerson was deeply scarred by the year she spent at the Mercer, she didn’t feel she could confide in her new husband: she never spoke of her experiences, worried it would make Yip even more worried about their son’s health. Meanwhile, Yip’s gambling problem continued. He lost all their money again. Their love affair was doomed. It just couldn’t survive everything they’d been through.
“Suddenly I’m overcome with despair,” Demerson wrote, “I get up from the table and go out on the veranda and cry. My dreams are crashing down. The poverty, isolation, and my son’s illness have disheartened me and I’ve lost respect for the man I love. He can’t offer protection to the baby and me. My stay in the Mercer has ruined my spontaneity. The world looks grim.” She was twenty-two years old.
Velma Demerson was in her sixties by the time she began her search for answers. She started digging through archives and enlisted the help of a lawyer. Together, they began to uncover the truth about her months at the Mercer and the things that had been done to her there. It wasn’t until 2003 — when she was eighty-two years old — that the provincial government officially apologized for what happened. The following year, she finally reclaimed her Canadian citizenship — it had been stripped from her after she married Yip. Even then, she kept fighting, knowing how many others had suffered a similar fate to hers. She would keep raising awareness and pushing for justice until the day she died — at the impressive age of ninety-eight.
By then, the Andrew Mercer Reformatory for Women had been gone for decades. The imposing brick building was demolished in 1969. Tales of torture, abuse, and medical experiments had become a recurring theme. Women had been resisting the poor treatment they received at the Mercer since the 1800s. One notorious sex worker and petty criminal, Lizzie Lessard, had even retaliated against a two-week stint in solitary by stabbing a warden repeatedly with a pair of scissors, making sure to infect them with her own case of syphilis first. In 1948, the prisoners rose up in protest, staging a riot. Years later, a grand jury was convened to investigate. The Toronto Star ran front page stories about the horrors found inside the institution. The Mercer was finally shut down and destroyed. Alan Lamport Stadium replaced it.
But the place where so many women once suffered is still remembered in the name of the neighbourhood where it stood. Both the Mercer and the Toronto Central Prison, just down the road, faced onto the same street. Prisoners who were released from either institution would take their first steps of freedom on that road — so it was given an appropriate name, one which, many decades later, would be adopted for the entire neighbour-hood as it filled with condos, restaurants, and bars. They called that street Liberty Street, and the neighbourhood Liberty Village.