Janet Chance (10 February 1886 – 18 December 1953) was a British feminist writer,

sex education Sex education, also known as sexual education, sexuality education or sex ed, is the instruction of issues relating to human sexuality, including emotional relations and responsibilities, human sexual anatomy, Human sexual activity, sexual acti ...

advocate and birth control and abortion law reformer.

Life

Born in

Edinburgh, Scotland Edinburgh ( ; gd, Dùn Èideann ) is the capital city of Scotland and one of its 32 Council areas of Scotland, council areas. Historically part of the county of Midlothian (interchangeably Edinburghshire before 1921), it is located in Lothian ...

to Scottish Calvinist minister and New College principal

Alexander Whyte ''For the British colonial administrator, see Alexander Frederick Whyte'' Rev Alexander Whyte D.D.,LL.D. (13 January 18366 January 1921) was a Scottish divine. He was Moderator of the General Assembly of the Free Church of Scotland in 1898. ...

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 London is the capital and largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary down to the North Sea, and has been a major s ...

where they both became enthusiastic advocate and financial supporters of the English

Malthusian League The Malthusian League was a British organisation which advocated the practice of contraception and the education of the public about the importance of family planning. It was established in 1877 and was dissolved in 1927. The organisation was secul ...

and the efforts of American reformer

Margaret Sanger Margaret Higgins Sanger (born Margaret Louise Higgins; September 14, 1879September 6, 1966), also known as Margaret Sanger Slee, was an American birth control activist, sex educator, writer, and nurse. Sanger popularized the term "birth control ...

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 Stella Browne (9 May 1880 – 8 May 1955) was a Canadian-born British feminist, socialist, sex radical, and birth control campaigner. She was one of the primary women in the fight for women's right to control and make decisions regarding their s ...

and

Dora Russell Dora, Countess Russell (née Black; 3 April 1894 – 31 May 1986) was a British author, a feminist and socialist campaigner, and the second wife of the philosopher Bertrand Russell. She was a campaigner for contraception and peace. She worked ...

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. She gave a report, "A Marriage Education Centre in London," at the Third Congress of the

World League for Sexual Reform The World League for Sexual Reform was a League for coordinating policy reforms related to greater openness around sex. The initial groundwork for the organisation, including a congress in Berlin which was later counted as the organisation's first, ...

in London in September 1929. 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'', which was banned in Ireland, ''Intellectual Crime'', and ''The Romance of Reality'' 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 Badges from the 1970s campaigning to keep and expand the achievements of the ALRA Abortion Rights is an advocacy organisation that promotes access to abortion in the United Kingdom. It was formed in 2003 by the merger of the Abortion Law Refo ...

(ALRA) with WBCG colleague Alice Jenkins and the physician

Joan Malleson Joan Graeme Malleson (née Billson; 4 June 1899 – 14 May 1956) was an English physician, specialist in contraception and prominent advocate of the legalisation of abortion. Life Billson was born at Ulverscroft, Leicestershire. She was educ ...

. Working through

Women's Co-operative Guild The Co-operative Women's Guild was an auxiliary organisation of the co-operative movement in the United Kingdom which promoted women in co-operative structures and provided social and other services to its members. History The guild was founded ...

s 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. 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 en, Viennese , iso_code = AT-9 , registration_plate = W , postal_code_type = Postal code , postal_code = , timezone = CET , utc_offset = +1 , timezone_DST ...

and

Prague Prague ( ; cs, Praha ; german: Prag, ; la, Praga) is the capital and largest city in the Czech Republic, and the historical capital of Bohemia. On the Vltava river, Prague is home to about 1.3 million people. The city has a temperate ...

in the summer of 1938. Among those she was trying to help were Austrian actress

Lilia Skala Lilia Skala (née Sofer; 28 November 1896 – 18 December 1994) was an Austrian-American architect and actress known for her role in the film '' Lilies of the Field'' (1963), for which she received critical acclaim and an Academy Award nomination ...

, Ludwig Chiavacci and Sidonie Furst. 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.

Family

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 University College Hospital (UCH) is a teaching hospital in the Fitzrovia area of the London Borough of Camden, England. The hospital, which was founded as the North London Hospital in 1834, is closely associated with University College London ...

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

Life

Family

References

Further reading