Doctoral student Gisela Bock was in Rome studying Latin sources from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when comrade Sigrid Rüger threw a tomato at the board table in September 1968 at the delegates' congress of the Socialist German Student Union in Berlin.

The study of Roman sources resulted in a work on the Dominican monk Tommaso Campanella, his utopian thinking and his involvement in the Calabrian revolt against Spanish rule in southern Italy.

The fruit thrown in Berlin ensured that previously ignored positions of feminist students received broader attention.

After Gisela Bock returned to Freie Universität, where she received her doctorate from Wilhelm Berges and was hired as an assistant by Hans-Ulrich Wehler in 1971, her academic work intertwined with her involvement in Berlin's dynamic political scene.

She was one of the founders of the Autonomous Women's Center in West Berlin.

One of its central activities was the protest against the ban on abortions: "Children or none, we decide for ourselves!" Selma James, which became a bible of the autonomous women's movement.

work for love?

In 1976, at the first summer university for women at the Free University, together with Barbara Duden, she gave a lecture entitled "Work out of love - love as work" on female housework as an invisible and unpaid, but nonetheless supporting part of the capitalist economic system.

It marks the transition of the political campaign "Wage for Housework" into an academic exploration of the interrelated histories of female and male working and living conditions.

She "never only paid attention to equality with men, but also to the differences between women, between women and men and between men," said Gisela Bock later in an interview that Cillie Rentmeister conducted with her.

"And why don't I expect so much from 'equality'?

I don't think equality with men is the ultimate happiness we wish for.

The men are also very different, I don't want to resemble everyone.

To me, when trying to define feminism, it's very important that you don't just talk about 'equal rights' – of course, equal rights and opportunities, but that's the minimum.

In many areas, women's interests and rights (existing or hoped for) can differ from those of men, just think of mothers and motherhood, of sexualized violence,

Gisela Bock's habilitation thesis, published as a book in 1986, deals with forced sterilization under National Socialism.

Between 1933 and 1945, the Nazi regime ordered about 400,000 sterilizations, to which "asocial, inferior and hopelessly hereditary patients" (Reich Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick) were forced.

The sterilization campaign, the counterpart of a pronatalistic policy to reproduce "hereditally healthy" offspring, was intended to get the social project of the "Volksgemeinschaft" off the ground.

At first glance, the Nazi sterilization policy appears to be gender-blind, since it affected women and men equally.

In women, however, the operation was much more dangerous.

Of the estimated 5,000 deaths from sterilizations, 90 percent were women - most of them dying trying to