I play on a pub trivia team, and one of my teammates is putting together a quiz of her own with some guys from a rival team. I mentioned to her that I’d like to see more questions about women, about women’s accomplishments, about historical events meaningful to women (not to mention more sports questions about women’s sports) in pub quizzes in general. To the extent that there are questions about people, they tend to be about men. And many of the rounds (like sports) are geared to what men are socialized to think is important.* Women aren’t exactly erased, but they’re overlooked. And if women and women’s concerns aren’t considered something worth knowing or learning about, then it’s a short step to women and women’s concerns being considered unimportant.
So, since Elizabeth agreed that more questions about women and women’s issues would be a really great and subversive way to get more people thinking about women-related factoids — because they could come up at any time on a quiz! — I’m doing a bleg for feminist trivia.
Melissa McEwan suggested Eve’s Quest, which she reviewed here, as a good source of trivia questions. But do any of you have any good sources of feminist trivia or factoids you can share with the class?
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* Despite the fact that there’s a sports round every time and my team is mostly-female and mostly-uninterested-in-your-typical-American-sports, we win frequently. It helps that the Quizmaster is from Ireland and therefore, we escape the kind of football-and-baseball-centric sports rounds that favor American men. However, the Olympics are open to both men and women, and Liam’s sports rounds still largely ignore the women.