By Megan Tady
Above: Suzy Chaffee is card number one in the original supersisters™ trading card set which aimed to empower women and girls by highlighting accomplished women in a wide variety of fields.
Eight-year-old Melissa Rich was fed up. The year was 1978, and to play Little League she had to join the all-boys team. Only men, she noticed, were on the baseball cards that kids were trading and sticking into their bike spokes, creating the sound of revved-up motorcycles. To watch women compete athletically, she had to wait for the Olympics. Every four years.
Confused and frustrated, Melissa asked her mother, Lois Rich, a question that would change their family’s trajectory: “Mom, why aren’t there any girls on baseball cards? That isn’t fair.” Lois and her sister, Barbara Egerman, realized she was right, and they decided to act. If the world didn’t offer Melissa and her female friends trading cards featuring women, then they would. Their cards, dubbed supersisters™, would include women of achievement in a variety of fields: politics, arts, entertainment, science, engineering, sports, and more. Lois was based in Irvington, New York, and Barbara in Ridgefield, Connecticut, and their family owned a summer cottage in Stockbridge. Together they scoured local libraries, curating a list of 500 women to contact via snail mail. A crash course in printing taught them that only 72 cards could fit on a poster for cutting and collating. Whoever responded first would be included. “There was no such thing as the internet back then,” Lois recalled. “We would call the operator and say, ‘Do you have an address for Gloria Steinem?’” Turns out, they did. Journalist and activist Steinem attended Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, and co-founded New York magazine and Ms. Magazine. She said yes to Lois and Barbara’s invitation to be on a supersisters™ card—as did anthropologist Margaret Mead, civil rights activist Rosa Parks, actor Ruby Dee, and U.S. lawmaker Shirley Chisolm, who was the first African American woman to serve in Congress.
Journalist Lynne Baranski wrote this article about supersistersTM for People Magazine.
The esteemed list included two pioneering women with Berkshire ties: Ms. Magazine co-founder Letty Cottin Pogrebin, who worked for the publication for 17 years, and flutist Doriot Anthony Dwyer, the first woman to be named principal chair in a major U.S. orchestra. By 1979, when the supersisters™ cards were published, Pogrebin was writing a column for Ladies’ Home Journal called “The Working Woman,” and she’d co-founded the National Women’s Political Caucus with Steinem. A renowned speaker and social justice activist, she went on to publish two novels and 10 works of nonfiction, and she was a 2018 inductee in the Manhattan Jewish Hall of Fame. The Berkshires have been on Pogrebin’s radar since 1959 thanks to a concert at Tanglewood in Lenox. She now divides her time between New York City and Stockbridge, where she purchased a home in 2009. Dwyer was also introduced to the Berkshires via Tanglewood. In 1952, she auditioned for the position of principal flutist of the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO) at Tanglewood, BSO’s summer venue. She broke gender barriers by earning the position, which she held for nearly four decades. “Forty-five years ago, this information about women was largely missing from marketing, media, toys, and textbooks,” Melissa said. “There was nothing. Boys had baseball cards. Boys could see themselves growing up to be professional baseball players. Most of them never would, but all of them thought they could.”
Two cards featuring pioneering women with ties to the Berkshires.
At first, Lois and Barbara planned to distribute the cards in local schools as an educational tool, but a 1980 New York Times article about supersisters™, including photos of Steinem’s and Dwyer’s cards, spurred national media attention and a wave of mail orders. “Suddenly, we got publicity from all over the country, and even all over the world,” Lois said. “We had a business.” A business that rapidly took over Lois’s household, with the master bedroom becoming supersisters™ headquarters, boxes of correspondence piling high, while the ping pong table in the basement served as the collating station. “Nothing was digital then,” Lois said. “We had boxes of permissions from each of the women, and the pictures that they sent. If they didn’t have pictures, my sister-in-law would take them. Most of these women didn’t have agents then, which would not be the case now.” Jane Pauley, co-host of NBC’s “Today,” was featured on a supersisters™ card, prompting her to send journalist Tony Guida to interview the sisters at Lois’s house and film Melissa and her friends playing with the cards. Adding to the chaos on that particular day: a hamster got loose, and the family had to chase it around the house amidst the film crew.
The original permission forms from Rosa Parks, Maya Angelou, and Judy Blume—Angelou and Blume would have been in the second supersisters series, but it was never published.
“It was truly homegrown,” Melissa said. “There weren’t a lot of women starting businesses at that time. What Lois and Barbara achieved from this one little spark of an idea was truly amazing. They didn’t invent a cure for cancer. They didn’t even invent baseball cards. But they made sure that women were included in that phenomenon.” Not everyone, however, was pleased—especially as Lois and Barbara applied for and won a grant from the New York State Department of Education. “The backlash was strong because people considered these cards ‘feminist,’ and we had a fight on our hands,” Lois said. Lois and Barbara worked on the supersisters™ from 1978 to 1984, intending to produce a second set of cards, even getting responses from children’s book author Judy Blume and the memoirist and poet Maya Angelou. Life, however, had other plans, and the sisters put the project on hold while they diverted their attention to other careers. Lois used the Stockbridge cottage to store the boxes of correspondence. Recently, the project has garnered new attention and interest. The Feminist Institute, an organization documenting feminist contributions to society, digitized and archived the supersisters™ materials. In online programming, The Metropolitan Museum of Art showcased two supersisters™ cards, Olympic skier Suzy Chaffee and Shirley Chisholm. Melissa has plans to continue to relaunch the project, knowing that gender equity still has a long way to go. “I was looking through the boxes, and I found a letter from another 8-year-old girl. It was written in bubble letters. It said, ‘I saved up my money for a deck of supersisters™ cards. I want to be president someday.’ We came close, and maybe we still will. But the legacy of these cards is showing girls they can be anything they want to be. If they can see her, they can be her.”
To learn more, visit supersisterscards.com
To see more from the archive, visit thefeministinstitute.org
Poster proof of the first edition supersisters cards™
