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The Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College is an internationally recognized repository of manuscripts, photographs, periodicals and other primary sources in women's history.

    Margaret Sanger and mothers at the Tucson Birth Control
            Clinic, June 1936 (Margaret Sanger papers)

It was founded in 1942 to be the Library's distinctive contribution to the college's mission of educating women. Under the inspired leadership of its first director, Margaret Storrs Grierson, the Sophia Smith Collection evolved from a collection of works by women writers into a historical research collection of material documenting the lives and activities of women. In 1946 it was named in honor of the founder of Smith College.

Today, the Collection consists of 6,000 linear feet of material in manuscript, print, and audio- visual formats. The holdings document the historical experience of women in the United States and abroad from the colonial era to the present. Subject strengths include birth control, women's rights, suffrage, the contemporary women's movement, U.S. women working abroad, the arts (especially theatre), the professions (especially journalism and social work), and middle-class family life in nineteenth- and twentieth-century New England. Many of these collections are rich sources of visual, as well as manuscript and printed material.

The Sophia Smith Collection
Smith College
Northampton, MA 01063
telephone:   413 585-2970
fax:   413 585-2886
email: ssc-wmhist@smith.edu 
email form: Reference Request Email Form