About the Project

The Margaret Sanger Papers Project is a historical editing project initially sponsored by the Department of History and then by the Division of Libraries at New York University. The Project was formed by Dr. Esther Katz in 1985 to locate, arrange, edit, research, and publish the papers of the noted birth control pioneer.

The Margaret Sanger Papers Project has published a two-series microfilm edition, the Margaret Sanger Papers Microfilm, Smith College Collections and the Collected Documents Series. Work on the Smith College Collections entailed the rearrangement and organization of over 50,000 Sanger documents in the Margaret Sanger collection and seventeen other collections at the Sophia Smith Collection and Smith College Archives. Work on the Collected Documents Series included a ten-year international search of over 1,500 archives and private collections, photocopying material and organizing over 9,000 documents for publication. Both series have been published with a printed reel guide that includes an item-level index by University Publications of America, now a division of Proquest. On online edition of the Project's micorfilm is available through Proquest's History Vault

The Project has completed a four-volume book edition of Sanger's Papers, published by the University of Illinois Press. The volumes are subtitled The Woman Rebel, 1900-1928, Birth Control Comes of Age, 1928-1939, The Politics of Planned Parenthood, 1939-1966, and 'Round the World for Birth Control,' 1920-1959, have been published.

The Project also published an electronic edition of a small sample of documents related to Sanger's Woman Rebel and is working on a larger electronic edition of Sanger's speeches and articles.