Microfilm Edition

Smith College Collections / Collected Documents / Library of Congress

The first goal of the Margaret Sanger Papers Project was to gather together her voluminous personal papers and make them readily available to the public. Preserving them on microfilm guaranteed their survival and enabled researchers who were not located at the repositories that held the collections to search through the entire corpus of Sanger's Papers.

From 1986-1996, the Margaret Sanger Papers Project organized and microfilmed the Margaret Sanger papers in the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College and from other respositories. We organized, assembled the documents, and produced astate of the art microfilm edition of over 60,000 papers and records divided into two series: the Smith College Collections and Collected Documents. The Margaret Sanger Papers Microfilm Edition (101 reels) was published in 1996 by University Publications of America (now Proquest, with a printed reel guide and name and title index to each series. Now available in over twenty-five libraries from Ankara to Detroit, the microfilm edition, enables chiefly scholars and students to make use of Sanger’s papers in their entirety.

In the 1940s, Margaret Sanger donating what she called her "professional papers" to the Library of Congress. In reality, this collection, much as the "personal" one she donated to Smith College, documents both her professional and personal life, and neither one is complete on its own. The Library of Congress collection, was microfilmed in 1977, and the Sanger Project has completed a draft index to the Sanger documents on that microfilm (the reels also include records created by . Sanger's birth control organizations).

We continue to gather Sanger documents and anticipate issuing an addendum microfilm that will include these additional documents unearthed since 1996.