Emma Baeri


Emma Baeri 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 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. While still a girl, she moved to Catania with her family in 1951.
In 1960 she earned her high school diploma at the Mario Cutelli Classical Lyceum of Catania. In 1968 she graduated with a degree in political science at the University of Catania with a thesis on the history of political doctrines on education reforms in Sicily in the second half of the eighteenth century. She was a researcher and instructor of modern history in the same faculty from 1972 to 2007.

Professional political activity

marked a watershed for her political, intellectual, and personal life. In December 1975 she began her political career in the feminist movement: in the "Woman Difference" collective she became conscious of her self; later, she practiced "inside-outside" politics—within the group and in public policy struggles by the Coordination for Women's Self-Determination of Catania in defense of Law 194's abortion rights, for a women's shelter, against sexual violence, for unilateral disarmament when American missiles were placed in Comiso, and then, in the Friday Group, she found a strong political relationship that lasted more than twenty years. Lately, as of 2011, she has participated in the Voltapagina literary café group.
In 1986, at the conclusion of that revolutionary decade, Emma Baeri launched a close-quarter body-to-body encounter between her woman-body and the corpus of historiography. In 1992 this labor gave birth to I Lumi e il cerchio. Una esercitazione di storia, 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, 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 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 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, 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:
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.