Emma Baeri

Emma Baeri (born July 11, 1942) is a Sicilian feminist historian and essayist. She has played an active role in organizing feminist political action and literary life in Italy along with her academic career.

Biography Emma Baeri was born in Palermo, Italy, the daughter of parents Ernesto Baeri, an electrical engineer, and Maria Parisi. During her childhood she lived in Agrigento, a city she established a strong emotional relationship with, and Piazza Armerina. a text that contaminated the genres—novel, autobiography, historical essay, poetry—entrusting their mutual stridency to the disruptive effect of the unforeseen subject—a woman, her biohistorical experience—in the discourse of historiography. A necessary contamination in the transformation of an orthodox history—engaged in research on the events of a canonical Enlightenment education reformer of eighteenth-century Sicily, Giovanni Agostino De Cosmi—in an unforeseen history, by the inability of the hereditary instruments of work to answer this question: Why are women, although present in history, absent from historiography?

In 1989, she was one of the founding members of the Società Italiana delle Storiche (Italian Society of Women Historians), of which she spent two terms in office as a director. In the Society she immediately went to work on the Education Commission, an experience out of which she curated the book Generazioni: Trasmissione della storia e tradizione delle donne (Generations: Transmission of women's history and tradition) from a seminar held by the Society. In 1993, 1995, and 2004 at the Women's History Summer School, first organized by the Society at the Carthusian monastery of Pontignano near Siena, and later in Fiesole. She was a council member of the Unione Femminile Nazionale (National Women's Union) and president and council member of the United Women's Archives of Milan.

Her writings appear in many feminist periodicals, such as Noi donne, DWF: donnawomanfemme, Lapis, Nosside, Il Paese delle Donne, and they testify to her growing interest in the methodology of historical research, in the history of Italian feminism, with particular focus on curating the movement's archives and on the links between feminism and citizenship.

In 1997 Baeri participated with Annarita Buttafuoco in preparing the exhibit Riguardarsi ('looking out for yourself'), a traveling exhibit of manifestos from the women's political movement in Italy. From this experience was born the book Riguardarsi: Manifesti del Movimento Politico delle Donne in Italia.

Writings Baeri's publications include: "Costituzione Articolo Zero: Proposta di Preambolo alla Costituzione della Repubblica Italiana" "Desiderio di una Storia, Desiderio di Storia: Esperienze e Riflessioni di Ricerca Didattica e Metodologica" "Noi Utopia delle Donne di Ieri, Memoria delle Donne di Domani" "Violenza, Conflitto, Disarmo: Pratiche e Riletture Femministe", "Cerniere di cittadinanza: Il protagonismo femminile degli anni Settanta", "Cittadine in transizione. Spunti di riflessione per una cittadinanza differente", "Si può insegnare la passione? A proposito di donne, politica, istituzioni"

In 2012, in a limited, not-for-sale edition, she published Isola mobile: nipoti, gatti, scritti, a "bookish object," as the author calls it, that gathers scattered texts published and unpublished, fragments of memoir, poetic words, and photographs illustrating her three great passions: collages, patchworks, and cats.

In 2013 she published Dividua, whose back cover reads:

Personal life Baeri is married and has two daughters, Maria Carla and Paola; three grandchildren, Gabriele, Lorenzo, and Anna; and an extended feline family.