Thursday, August 7, 2014

Absent Voices

The story goes that a little boy looked around his elementary school and said it needed "more teachers made out of men."

 

Yesterday as I posted a sampling of local blogs I found myself horrified that only one out of the five posts I shared was by a woman.

This was followed by some soul-searching. Do I just skip over blogs written by women and not give them fair consideration? In other words, am I myself a part of the problem? I find that I do look first at community-focused blogs, as that is my own area of particular interest. Women seem to be less represented in that category.

 

There are plenty of women writing blogs in Howard County, as evidenced by the aggregator page run by Jessie Newburn and Robin Abello. Their chosen topics range from personal life musings to food to faith and beyond. But in the area of community and politics, women are under-represented. And I wish this were not the case.

 

There are excellent male bloggers in Howard County and I wouldn't want to lose a single one of them, even if we don't always see eye-to-eye on the issues. But their perspective isn't enough. We can't keep accepting the male perspective as our default perspective and then sprinkle in a few women for "equal time". Our world doesn't look like that. So why should our blog community look like that?

 

So, women of Howard County, I'm looking for a few good bloggers. Or, a whole bunch of them, to write on community topics and/or politics. Could there ever be an old-girls network in Howard County blogging? Who knows. But we need to start with more bloggers made out of women.

 

*****

 

Two new posts from Lisa B., Mrs. S. for August 6th and 7th. It's great to hear her voice.

 

 

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