Born in
Edinburgh, Scotland to Scottish Calvinist minister and New College principal Alexander
Whyte and Jane Elizabeth Barbour, Janet Whyte married successful chemical firm owner and
stockbroker Clinton Frederick Chance in 1912. The couple soon moved to London, England where they
both became enthusiastic advocate and financial supporters of the English Malthusian League and the
efforts of American reformer Margaret Sanger and the birth control movement. Despite suffering from
intermittent bouts of depression, Janet Chance threw herself into work becoming a member of the
Workers' Birth Control Group (WBCG), founded in 1924 by birth control advocates Stella
Browne and Dora Russell to give women wider access to birth control information. Chance was so
moved by the plight of poor and working-class women who had no knowledge of sex and reproduction
and no access to the latest available contraceptive methods that she helped run a sex education centre
in the East End of London.[1] She gave a report, "A Marriage Education Centre in London," at the Third
Congress of the World League for Sexual Reform in London in September 1929.[2]
Convinced that a large part of the problem lay in the repressed, provincial British view of sex and
reproduction, Chance wrote several books on the importance of acknowledging women's sexuality and
educating them about it, reflecting, albeit in modest terms, the views of the sex reform movement.
These included The Cost of English Morals,[3] Intellectual Crime,[4] and The Romance of Reality [5]
Chance was increasingly convinced that a large part of the problem lay in the fact that birth control
options for poor women, especially were limited and in many cases their only option was abortion. but
abortion was illegal in all cases in Great Britain under the 1861 Offences against the Person Act, was
made legal only to save the life of the mother under the 1929 Infant Life Act To this end, in 1936 Chance
helped found and support the Abortion Law Reform Association (ALRA) with WBCG colleague Alice
Jenkins[6] and the physician Joan Malleson. Working through Women's Co-operative Guilds and
the Labour Party, the ALRA sought to pressure politicians to support the notion that women should have
the power to decide if their own pregnancies would be terminated.[7]
During the late 1930s, Janet Chance also worked to help get refugees out of Germany, Austria and other
Nazi-occupied nations, even traveling to Vienna and Prague in the summer of 1938. Among those she
was trying to help were Austrian actress Lilia Skala, Ludwig Chiavacci and Sidonie Furst.[8] She also
continued to chair the ALRA through World War II, helping to keep the organization alive and ready for a
post-war resurgence. But after the war, the ALRA shifted from pressuring Labour Party members, to
campaigning more generally for a new parliamentary law by pushing for a private member's bill.
However, they were unsuccessful until the 1967 passage of an Abortion bill.
In August 1953, Chance's husband Clinton died. Janet Chance, whose battle with depression intensified
had to be hospitalized. On December 18, four months after Clinton's death, Janet Chance threw herself
from a window at London's University College Hospital and died
Stephen Brooke, ‘Chance , Janet (1886–1953)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford
University Press, May 2006; Online Edition, accessed 26 April 2013 Jan 2008
^ Norman Haire, ed. Proceedings of the Third Sexual Reform Congress (WLSR: London, 1929):37-39
^ Janet Chance,The Cost of English Morals (London: Neil Douglas, 1931)
^ Janet Chance, Intellectual Crime (London: Neil Douglas, 1933)
^ Janet Chance, The Romance of Reality (London: Neil Douglas, 1934)
^ Stephen Brooke, ‘Jenkins , Alice Brook (1886–1967)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford
University Press, May 2006; online edn, May 2008 accessed 24 Oct 2017
^ Brooke, Stephen. "A New World for Women? Abortion Law Reform in Britain during the
1930s," American Historical Review 106:2 (2001):432
^ Janet Chance to MS, July 22 and Aug. 9, 1938, Margaret Sanger Papers, Library of Congress microfilm,
reel 16 frames 670 and 904).
^ Stephen Brooke, ‘Chance , Janet (1886–1953)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford
University Press, May 2006; Online Edition, accessed 26 April 2013] Jan 2008
