Six weeks of Feminist Friday Discussions: A Reflection

Nine weeks ago I had the idea of using Feminist Friday posts to generate discussions about gender inequality and women’s issues. I was surprised by the interest it generated. We kept these discussions going for six consecutive weeks on three different blogs.

You can find the links to the discussions from the first five weeks here. The sixth week was at Drifting Through My Open Mind.

I like all the threads so far. I find every one of them useful, and I’ve learned things from them, but the first one (on the usefulness of Feminism as a political label) is my favorite. Here’s why.

• The discussions were just an idea until I published that post, and I did it because other bloggers encouraged me to do it.
• I expected 15 comments, and the thread ended up with 99.
• There were lots of people with different perspectives on that thread. Not everyone agreed, but the discussion was productive and civil.
• The folks who commented didn’t just talk to me about the post. They talked to one another about the questions I raised.
• It was my first original Feminist Friday post, and it gave me the encouragement I needed to keep writing them.

Here’s why I think the first post worked so well:

• It was something new.
• I promoted it for a solid week beforehand on the blogs, Facebook, and Twitter.
• The post tells a story that’s interesting, at least to bloggers.
• The prompt is the best I’ve written so far. It’s concise. The question is focused, but open-ended enough for people with differing points-of-view to comment. It doesn’t require a person to have a lot of specific knowledge to feel like they’re giving an informed opinion.

Today, I have a question to help us get these discussions rolling again. One of the most common ideas that came out of the previous round is that we should talk about education as a solution to many of the problems we discussed. We also agreed that education has to be broken down into categories. At minimum, we need to talk about the following categories separately:

1. Early childhood education
2. Primary and secondary education (probably as separate categories)
3. Higher education
4. Adult education

We must be sensitive to the fact that education isn’t the same everywhere. It varies from country to country, and from region to region within countries. This is a very complex topic.

My question about education for today is:

If you were getting ready tackle this topic comprehensively over several weeks, would you start with early childhood and work chronologically through the life cycle, or would you go about it in some other way? Perhaps by identifying a single issue and applying each category of education to that issue in a series of separate posts?

Feedback is important here, because this is my next step, even if it means I have to cut back to a Feminist Friday post every other week to get it done.

Thanks for making the last round of discussions such a success. If you want another round of them, all you have to do is keep talking to me about this, and I’ll do my best to help make it happen.

Images from Part Time Monster’s feminism board.