The Margaret Sanger Papers Project: Book and Digital Editions

FAIN: RQ-50636-12

New York University (New York, NY 10012-1019)
Esther Katz (Project Director: December 2011 to January 2015)

Preparation for publication of the fourth volume of the selected papers of Margaret Sanger (1879-1966), founder of the American birth control movement, as well as completing a digital edition of her speeches and articles and developing a prototype of a digital image edition. (24 months)

The Margaret Sanger Papers Project seeks a two-year grant to complete its fourth and final volume of the Selected Papers of Margaret Sanger, complete its digital edition of Speeches and Articles of Margaret Sanger, and build a prototype digital archive of documents from 1914 as a test of the feasibility of creating an image-based edition enhanced with project research.

Media Coverage

Review (Review)
Author(s): Vern Bullough
Publication: Archives of Sexual Behavior
Date: 12/1/2004

Review (Review)
Author(s): Vern Bullough
Publication: Social Service Review
Date: 12/1/2003

Review (Review)
Author(s): Vern Bullough
Publication: Bulletin of the History of Medicine
Date: 12/10/2004

Review (Review)
Author(s): Vern Bullough
Publication: Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries
Date: 1/10/2004
Abstract: Volume I was selected as one of Choice's "Outstanding Academic Titles"

Review (Review)
Author(s): Vern Bullough
Publication: Journal of the American Medical Association
Date: 7/16/2003

"Planned Un-Parenthood: Roe v. Wade at thirty." (Review)
Author(s): Vern Bullough
Publication: The Weekly Standard
Date: 1/27/2003

"Sanger vs. Sanger (Review)
Author(s): Vern Bullough
Publication: The Nation
Date: 7/30/2007

Review (Review)
Author(s): Vern Bullough
Publication: Throwbacklist Thursday: Women’s Work
Date: 3/10/2016
URL: https://www.press.uillinois.edu/wordpress/throwbacklist-thursday-22/

Review (Review)
Author(s): Vern Bullough
Publication: No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship
Date: 12/10/2021

Review (Review)
Author(s): Vern Bullough
Publication: Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering
Date: 12/10/2004

"From the Gutter of Obscenity" (Review)
Author(s): Vern Bullough
Publication: Documentary Editiong
Date: 12/10/2006
URL: https://sanger.hosting.nyu.edu/project/reviews/

"Sorting from the Truth: The Letters of Margaret Sanger" (Review)
Author(s): Vern Bullough
Publication: H-Review
Date: 9/10/2009
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=24628

"A Place in the Sun" (Review)
Author(s): Vern Bullough
Publication: Documentary Editing
Date: 12/10/2008

Review (Review)
Author(s): Vern Bullough
Publication: Population and Development Review
Date: 9/10/2007

Associated Products

The Selected Papers of Margaret Sanger, Volume 4: 'Round the World for Birth Control, 1920-1966 (Book)
Title: The Selected Papers of Margaret Sanger, Volume 4: 'Round the World for Birth Control, 1920-1966
Author: Margaret Sanger
Editor: Cathy Moran Hajo, Associate Editor
Editor: Esther Katz, Editor
Editor: Peter C. Engelman, Associate Editor
Abstract: When Margaret Sanger returned to Europe in 1920, World War I had altered the social landscape as dramatically as it had the map of Europe. Population concerns, sexuality, venereal disease, and contraceptive use had entered public discussion, and Sanger's birth control message found receptive audiences around the world. This volume focuses on Sanger from her overseas advocacy during the interwar years through her postwar role in creating the International Planned Parenthood Federation. The documents reconstruct Sanger's birth control advocacy tours through early 1920s Germany, Japan, and China in the midst of significant government and religious opposition to her ideas. They also trace her efforts to build a global movement through international conferences and tours. Letters, journal entries, writings, and other records reveal Sanger's dealings with other activists, her correspondence with the likes of Albert Einstein and Eleanor Roosevelt, and Sanger's evolution from grassroots activist to postwar power broker and diplomat.
Year: 2016
Primary URL: https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/?id=c040382
Primary URL Description: publisher website
Secondary URL: https://sanger.hosting.nyu.edu/publications/volume_iv/
Secondary URL Description: Project website
Access Model: Book
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Type: Scholarly Edition
ISBN: 978-0-252-0403
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

Margaret Sanger Papers: Smith Collected Collections and Collected Douments Series (Web Resource)
Title: Margaret Sanger Papers: Smith Collected Collections and Collected Douments Series
Author: Esther Katz, Cathy Hajo, and Peter C. Engelman, editors
Abstract: From 1986-1996, with the help of NEH funds, the Margaret Sanger Papers Project organized and microfilmed the Margaret Sanger papers in the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College and from other repositories. We organized, assembled the documents, and produced a state-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. In 2018, Proquest digitized these two microfilm series and made them available online in its History Vault. The ProQuest History Vault provides access to millions of primary source, cross-searchable, full-text/full-image documents on the most widely studied topics in 19th and 20th-century American history.
Year: 2018
Primary URL: https://proquest.libguides.com/historyvault/sanger
Primary URL Description: Proquest web site
Secondary URL: https://sanger.hosting.nyu.edu/publications/microfilm/
Secondary URL Description: Project website

The Speeches and Articles of Margaret Sanger (Web Resource)
Title: The Speeches and Articles of Margaret Sanger
Author: Esther Katz and Cathy Hajo, editors
Abstract: The Speeches and Articles of Margaret Sanger (1911-1959), is a web-based edition of Sanger's writings, including articles, pamphlets, speeches, stories, and interviews, produced by The Margaret Sanger Papers Project (MSPP). Unlike much of the historical material currently available on the Internet, this edition is a completely vetted, historically accurate digital version of her writings and speeches that conform to established standards, both in terms of technical features of its encoding, and providing accurate renderings of the texts. It provides open access to complete versions of those articles, speeches and statements, most frequently cited and those that are often inaccessible to general readers. In this digital edition, the Project seeks to make these documents much more accessible to researchers. In a collection where there is so much material on a handful of subjects, readers may search documents by a date ranges, publication source, and type of document (speech, draft article, etc.), as well as by simple word. While such searches often return too many matches, they are invaluable for a researcher who wants to see each instance of Sanger's use of a word or term. A reader could search for the word "abortion" and go through each of them to get a sense of her views. However, in such a search will pick up not just discussions of abortion, but mere use of the word. In many instances Sanger simply said that birth control would reduce the frequency of abortions. To solve the problem of getting too many, often not relevant "hits" the Project has prepared a subject index. In the above example, this index will help generate fewer, but more relevant results.
Year: 2021
Primary URL: http://m-sanger.org/digi
Primary URL Description: Digital edition web page
Secondary URL: https://sanger.hosting.nyu.edu/documents/electroniced/
Secondary URL Description: Project web page

The Selected Papers of Margaret Sanger, Vol. 1: The Woman Rebel (paperback) (Book)
Title: The Selected Papers of Margaret Sanger, Vol. 1: The Woman Rebel (paperback)
Editor: Esther Katz, Cathy Moran Hajo, and Peter C. Engelman
Abstract: This first volume of The Selected Papers of Margaret Sanger documents the critical phases and influences of an American feminist icon and offers rare glimpses into her working-class childhood, burgeoning feminism, spiritual and scientific interests, sexual explorations, and diverse roles as wife, mother, nurse, journalist, radical socialist, and activist. These letters and other writings, including diaries, journals, articles, and speeches, most of which have never before been published, have been selected and assembled with an eye to telling the story of a remarkable life, punctuated by arrests and imprisonments, exile, love affairs, and a momentous personal loss--a life consumed with the quest for women's sexual liberation. Because its narrative line is so absorbing, Volume 1 may be read as a powerful biography. Volume 1 covers a twenty-eight-year period from her nurse's training and early socialist involvement in pre-World War I bohemian Greenwich Village to her adoption of birth control (a term she helped coin in 1914) as a fundamental tenet of women's rights. It traces the intersection of her life and work with other reformers, activists and leaders of modernity on both sides of the Atlantic, including Havelock Ellis, H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Emma Goldman, Max Eastman, and Eugene Debs, as well as many leading radical artists and writers of the day. It highlights her legislative and organizational efforts, her support of the eugenics movement, and the alliances she secured with medical professionals in her crusade to make birth control legal, respectable, and accessible. This volume also includes letters from women desperately in need of fertility control who saw Sanger as their last hope. Supplemented by an introduction, brief essays providing narrative and chronological links, and substantial notes, the volume is an invaluable tool for understanding Sanger's actions and accomplishments.
Year: 2007
Primary URL: https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/?id=p074608
Primary URL Description: Publisher web site
Secondary URL: https://sanger.hosting.nyu.edu/publications/volume_i/
Secondary URL Description: Project web site
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Type: Edited Volume
ISBN: 978-0-252-0746
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

The Selected Papers of Margaret Sanger, Vol 3: The Politics of Planned Parenthood (1939-1966) (Book)
Title: The Selected Papers of Margaret Sanger, Vol 3: The Politics of Planned Parenthood (1939-1966)
Editor: Esther Katz, Peter C. Engelman and Cathy Moran Hajo
Abstract: Volume III begins with the outbreak of war in Europe, Sanger's initial opposition to American entry and her worry over her two sons serving in the armed forces. The war years were quiet ones for her, as she officially retired from the Birth Control Federation of America (renamed Planned Parenthood Federation of America in 1942) and moved to Tucson to tend her ailing husband. But Sanger's continuing efforts to direct the birth control movement from afar according to her beliefs ran into opposition from BCFA leaders in New York. The divisive issues include the Negro Project, which Sanger hoped would bring birth control service to African-American women in the rural South through education undertaken by black community leaders, doctors and nurses; to clashes over Sanger's opposition to the transformation of birth control clinics into women's health and infertility centers. In the post-war years Sanger concentrated on the pursuit of her decades-long dream of finding an effective non-barrier method of birth control. It traces Sanger's masterful direction of scientists, philanthropists and birth control bureaucrats to combine forces toward the development of the first birth control pill, released in 1960. The volume concludes with Sanger's final years in which she surveyed and evaluated her life and work. In particular, her letters regarding the disposition of her papers and her correspondence with biographer Lawrence Lader provide an apt summary of her career.
Year: 2010
Primary URL: https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/?id=c033728
Primary URL Description: Publisher website
Secondary URL: https://sanger.hosting.nyu.edu/publications/volume_iii/
Secondary URL Description: Project website
Publisher: Unversity of Illinois Press
Type: Edited Volume
ISBN: 978-0-252-0337

The Selected Papers of Margaret Sanger, Volume 2: Birth Control Come of Age (Book)
Title: The Selected Papers of Margaret Sanger, Volume 2: Birth Control Come of Age
Editor: Cathy Moran Hajo
Editor: Esther Katz
Editor: Peter C. Engelman
Abstract: Volume II documents a difficult period for Sanger as she faced sustained political opposition to getting birth control legislation passed. Documents will track the unsuccessful efforts of her Congressional lobbying group, the National Committee for Federal Legislation on Birth Control, as their repeated efforts to amend the Comstock Act, as well as failed efforts to incorporate birth control into New Deal public health programs. It also will trace efforts to expand the reach of birth control clinics to rural and African-American women as well as Sanger's decision to shift from legislative to judicial reform. The success of the 1936 U.S. v. One Package decision overturned a major portion of the Comstock Law, resulting in Sanger's reluctant decision to reunite her Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau with the ABCL in 1939 to form the Birth Control Federation of America, an organization managed by public relations professionals, which in 1942 became the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. The volume will close with the growing threat of war in Europe and Sanger's efforts to assist the flight of German sex reformers and physicians.
Year: 2007
Primary URL: https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/?id=c031373
Primary URL Description: Publisher web site
Secondary URL: https://sanger.hosting.nyu.edu/publications/volume_ii/
Secondary URL Description: Project web site
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Type: Edited Volume
Type: Scholarly Edition
ISBN: 978-0-252-0313
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

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