Ms. playing cards
‘Ms. playing cards’ promoting votes for women, USA, 1975.
Produced in 1975 by Professional Training Aids at the height of the Women’s Liberation Movement that emerged in the late 1960s and continued into the 1980s, this pack portrays all the courts as women, while the jokers are men. And although not issued specifically as a commemorative pack, the card reverse shows a suffragette holding a “Votes for Women” placard.
Above: ‘Ms. playing cards’ published by Professional Training Aids promoting votes for women, USA, 1975.
Note: an image of the box can be seen at Johns Hopkins University Sheridan Libraries►
By Peter Burnett
United Kingdom • Member since July 27, 2022
I graduated in Russian and East European Studies from Birmingham University in 1969. It was as an undergraduate in Moscow in 1968 that I stumbled upon my first 3 packs of “unusual” playing cards which fired my curiosity and thence my life-long interest. I began researching and collecting cards in the early 1970s, since when I’ve acquired over 3,330 packs of non-standard cards, mainly from North America, UK and Western Europe, and of course from Russia and the former communist countries.
Following my retirement from the Bodleian Library in Dec. 2007 I took up a new role as Head of Library Development at the International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications (INASP) to support library development in low-income countries. This work necessitated regular training visits to many sub-Saharan African countries and also further afield, to Vietnam, Nepal and Bangladesh – all of which provided rich opportunities to further expand my playing card collection.
Since 2019 I’ve been working part-time in the Bodleian Library where I’ve been cataloguing the bequest of the late Donald Welsh, founder of the English Playing Card Society.
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