The Digital Edition, 1911-1959

The Speeches and Articles of Margaret Sanger (1911-1959), is a free, 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.

After eliminating multiple versions, the editors have included nearly 1,000 documents, each verified by date and title. We have searched for published versions when we only have drafts, and have culled from multiple versions to create the most complete documents. Each document was then carefully transcribed and proofread, and then indexed by subject.

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 keynote search would solve this.  But if a user does may not want to pick up the mere use of the word, as in the many instances Sanger simply said that birth control would reduce the frequency of abortions, a more directed search is possible through the use of our name and subject categories. (See Search).