Inventories of Memory

“Starting from oneself” was the inaugural gesture of 1970s feminism: thus time restarted from zero as the time of self-awareness, and politics and knowledge were redesigned in unimagined forms. What happens twenty years later, when it comes time to address the memory of those years? How can we give it shape without denying 그hat gesture, how can we make that change last? These are open questions, for which the history of the Catania Women’s Self-Determination Coordination has served as a laboratory. Between lived history and written history, this book composes a stratigraphy of memories in which the individual paths of some protagonists, and of those who inherit them today by transcribing their experience, stand side by side without merging, in a narrative to which the book itself provides a new, unexpected, political space.

Emma Baeri, 58, researcher of Modern History at the University of Catania. Active in the feminist movement since its origins, she wrote I Lumi e il cerchio (Editori Riuniti, 1992). Together with Annarita Buttafuoco, she edited Riguardarsi. Manifesti del movimento politico delle donne in Italia, Protagon, 1997. A founding member of the Italian Association of Women Historians (SIS), Board Member of the Unione Femminile Nazionale and the Archivi Riuniti delle Donne in Milan, she focuses on history teaching and historical research methodology. She has two daughters.

Sara Fichera, 33, architect (Polytechnic University of Milan, degree thesis on Political Places and Urban Spaces of the Catania Feminist Movement). She lives and works in Acireale.