British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology
영국 성심리학 연구회
The British society founded in 1913 to advance a radical programme of sex reform based on the writings of Edward Carpenter and Havelock Ellis. Magnus Hirschfeld was also a co-founder, and it was especially concerned to fight legal discrimination against homosexuality with scientific understanding. Carpenter was its first president, and Stella Browne, Laurence Housman and Bernard Shaw were among its members. Renamed the British Sexological Society in 1931, it lasted into the 1940s.
In depth
The British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology was founded in 1913 to advance a particularly radical agenda of sex reform based on the writings of “gurus” such as Edward Carpenter and Havelock Ellis; the German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld was also a co-founder. It was especially concerned with homosexuality, aiming to combat legal discrimination against it with scientific understanding. Carpenter was its first president.
Members of the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology included George Ives, Carpenter, Montague Summers, Stella Browne, later a founder of the Abortion Law Reform Association, Laurence Housman, Ellis, Bernard Shaw and Ernest Jones. It had contacts in the United States, including Margaret Sanger, and planned an American branch. From Policy & Principles (1914) it issued a pamphlet series including an abridged translation of a treatise of Hirschfeld’s Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, The Social Problem of Sexual Inversion, Browne’s Sexual Variety and Variability among Women (1917), Ellis’s The Erotic Rights of Women (1918) and Eden Paul and Norman Haire’s Rejuvenation (1923).
In 1931 the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology was renamed the British Sexological Society; its Laurence Housman appeared as a witness at the 1928 obscenity trial of The Well of Loneliness. It seems to have continued until some point in the 1940s.