Gisela Bock

Who is Gisela Bock?

Gisela Bock is a German historian. She studied in Freiburg, Berlin, Paris and Rome. She took her doctorate at the Free University Berlin in 1971 and her Habilitation at the Technical University Berlin in 1984. She has taught at the Free University Berlin and was professor at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, at the University of Bielefeld and then at the Free University Berlin. She retired in 2007.

In the 1970s, Bock was active in the international campaign for "wages for/against housework“ and was one of the pioneers in the emergence and establishment of "women and gender" history. She was a co-founder of the International Federation for Research in Women’s History. Bock's best known works are her theoretical articles on gender history and the volume Women in European History.

Published only in German, her 1986 book, Zwangssterilisation im Nationalsozialismus, was a study of the 400,000 compulsory sterilizations performed in Nazi Germany on "genetically inferior" men and women. Bock examined the history of sterilization in Nazi Germany with respect to the perpetrators as well as the victims, both women and men.