After graduation Ivy Curtis taught in different country towns, before returning to live and teach in the Cessnock Local Government Area. She taught at West Cessnock Public School, Greta Migrant Camp School, ending her working life at Kurri Kurri Public School where she retired as Head Mistress.

In 1932, when Ivy was 27, the NSW Government passed the Married Women (Lecturers and Teachers) Act which removed all married women from the teaching profession. It took 15 years of solid campaigning by female teachers to have the ban overturned. Ivy was a delegate with the Teacher's Federation who strenuously campaigned against this discriminatory law. Luckily she had remained unmarried and independent so she was able to continue to work as a teacher and buy a lovely home in Cessnock, where she lived for the rest of her life.

Ivy had a deep sense of social justice and was committed to world peace, but not in a traditional pacifist sense. Political peace campaigners wanted 'a just peace', not 'just peace', linking the 1930s rise of Fascism and Nazism with the crack down on freedom of thought, belief and expression across Europe. As the world started to slide into what would become World War II, political peace activists across the world organised resistance.

In December 1936 the Cessnock Peace Council formed. Ivy was there at the first meeting, not only becoming elected to the organising committee but becoming the council's first president. Quite a feat as she was the only woman on the committee. Straight to the top for Ivy! She always stayed in a leadership role, later serving as the secretary-treasurer of the council.

Despite the horrors of World War II Ivy hadn't given up on a more peaceful world. After the war she joined the first anti-nuclear movements of the 1950s, which rose as a global push-back against the proliferation of nuclear weapons, whose horror had been demonstrated in the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Ivy Curtis died in 1979.