1867–1950
○ Died
Poet and penal reformer who co-founded the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology
In 1914 he founded the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology with Carpenter, Hirschfeld, Housman and others to study sex scientifically and address birth control, abortion and prostitution.
A British poet, writer and penal reformer, born in Frankfurt the illegitimate son of an English army officer and raised by his grandmother. Educated at Magdalene College, Cambridge, he worked for what he called “the Cause”, ending the oppression of homosexuals, and tried to recruit Oscar Wilde in 1892. He formed a friendship with Carpenter in 1897 and in 1914 co-founded the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology, serving as its archivist. He studied prisons and penal methods across Europe. He left 122 volumes of diaries (1886–1949) and died in London in 1950.
Also known as: George Cecil Ives
Activities and affiliations
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1892–1950
Social movements and organizing
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1914–
British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology
Social movements and organizing -
Social movements and organizing
Related historical events
“The Cause” and the Sex Psychology Society
He met his birth mother only twice and had a fraught relationship with his father. From Cambridge until 1949 he amassed 45 volumes of scrapbooks of clippings on murders, punishments, theories of crime, transvestism, the psychology of gender, homosexuality and cricket scores. He played one first-class match for the Marylebone Cricket Club in 1902 and captained an Authors’ Club team, but resigned from the club in 1899 after overhearing members make violent and prejudiced comments about “the homosexuals”. He was a member of the Humanitarian League, a radical advocacy group active from 1891 to 1919.
Meeting Oscar Wilde at the Authors’ Club in 1892, he hoped to win him for what he called “the Cause”, the emancipation of homosexuals, but was disappointed; in 1893 he tried the same with Oxford poets introduced to him by Lord Alfred Douglas, with whom he had a brief affair. A visit to Edward Carpenter at Millthorpe in 1897 began their lifelong friendship and political partnership. In 1914 he founded the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology with Carpenter, Magnus Hirschfeld, Laurence Housman and others, and kept in touch with Havelock Ellis and Cesare Lombroso. The society promoted the scientific study of sex and a more rational attitude to sexual conduct and addressed birth control, abortion, sterilisation, venereal disease and prostitution; it became the British Sexological Society in 1931. Ives was its archivist.
He visited prisons across Europe, studying penal methods, especially England’s, and lectured and published on them. He died in London in 1950, aged 82, was cremated at Golders Green and asked that no Jewish or Christian texts or emblems be placed on his tomb. His letters, papers and 122 volumes of diaries, with daily entries from December 1886 to November 1949, were bought by the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in 1977; his correspondents included Adolf Brand, Havelock Ellis and Edvard Westermarck.