Born: 12 March 1868, Germany
Died: 7 January 1959
Country most active: Peru
Also known as: Dora Mayer Loehrs
Activist, journalist, essayist and intellectual Dora Mayer grew up in Peru after her family moved from Germany when she was a child. Her writing protested against the exploitation of women’s unpaid domestic labor as homemakers and abuses of the country’s indigenous people by the wealthy and powerful, including the lack of effective labor protection legislation. In addition to writing as a journalist, she edited El Deber Pro Indígena, La Crítica, Concordia and El Trabajo.
In 1909, Mayer co-founded the Asociación Pro-Indígena, which provided legal assistance and research to fight for rights such as protection from debt imprisonment.
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women founder Allison Tyra’s book The View from the Hill: Women Who Made Their Mark After 40.
Journalist Dora Mayer de Zulen was in her 40s when she co-founded the Asociación Pro-Indígena in 1909 to agitate for societal changes that would improve the lives of Indigenous, working class, and female Peruvians. She continued working for these causes even after the organization dissolved in 1916. Yet, as one researcher observed:
Though deeply involved in this movement, Dora Mayer, for the most part, remains relatively unresearched … Likely this is because she, as a historical figure, is difficult to place in any type of traditional box. Being a German immigrant to Peru, Dora Mayer cannot be used by nationalist scholars as a token of homegrown Peruvian activism.
Though involved in the feminist movement, she focused primarily on labor and Indigenous activism, so scholars cannot place her purely in the feminist context.
Perhaps this outside perspective as an immigrant is also why she has been cited as one of the few activists in this context who critiqued the anti-Asian racism of the time, though she did so with the paternalism one would expect from a European of that period. Born in Germany in 1868, she emigrated to Peru at age five and took up journalism at the turn of the century. It has been argued that Mayer earned the respect and support of her those in different sectors of Lima society at the turn of the century, not only for her “personal tenacity,” but also for “being rational, cultured, a correspondent for foreign and Peruvian newspapers, and, finally, her German origin, a country that symbolized progress, strength, the superior race.” Though she benefited from the very racism and colonialism that she fought against, she used this privilege for the causes she supported.
Most active in the 1910s and 1920s, Mayer worked to publicize the hardships of Indigenous Peruvians to non-Indigenous audiences, and the association also supported legal cases that served Indigenous interests. As one researcher notes, “It was the humanist Mayer who was in charge of appealing to the morality and compassion of politicians and other influential Peruvians to take measures to stop the exploitation of the Indigenous people.”