Dorothy Pizer
British activist (1906–1964)
Dorothy Pizer or Dorothy Padmore (c.1906 – 22 November 1964) was a British working-class anti-racist activist, secretary and publishing worker. In the 1940s and 1950s she was the partner, supporter and collaborator of Pan-African activist and Communist George Padmore.
Life
The daughter of a tailor who had left school at 15, Dorothy Pizer grew up in a household without books in London's East End. Since she had been too poor to accept a scholarship, her education was limited. Yet she later learnt stenography, became a business secretary, and became fluent in French.
Pizer's brother was a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), and she became involved with the CPGB in the 1930s. Through party contacts she met George Padmore in 1937, and by the end of World War II the pair were living together. She was always treated as Padmore's wife, although they were never formally married, and he had a former wife, Julia Semper. Dorothy supported the couple financially by continuing to work as a secretary during the day. She typed the manuscript of C. L. R. James's book World Revolution (1937), and also typed manuscripts for her husband.
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This entry incorporates text from “Dorothy Pizer” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.