Building a Different Memory Together: The Politics of Feminist Archives in Italy

In Italy, women began recording their own history in the 1980s in autonomous spaces of feminist culture called Women’s Documentation Centres, aimed at collecting feminist and women’s documents to preserve women’s history, but also to use the knowledge of the movement to rethink the mainstream “patriarchal” culture. The essay will show how this group of Italian women faced their invisibility both in history and in society starting from an unusual place of power: the archives. Also, the archives have been the place where the feminist movement started rebuilding a collective political practice, based on the belief that women could create grounded and powerful political networks, starting from the construction of intergenerational relationships.