Education and civil rights movement activism[edit]
Pamela Parker was born in Pennsylvania in 1943.[1] She grew up Episcopalian and lived in Solebury, Pennsylvania. Her mother was a nursery school teacher and her father worked as a manager in a rubber goods factory.[2]
Allen was a key activist in the white women's liberation movement and she advocated for greater attention to be given to racism within the movement.[7] She co-founded New York Radical Women in 1967.[8] The group planned the Jeannette Rankin Brigade action.[1] Allen later left the group, criticizing their views of motherhood and rejection of traditional roles for women.[9] She worked for The Guardian in early 1968.[1] She moved to San Francisco, where she joined the feminist group Sudsofloppen.[10] Based on her experiences with the group, she wrote the influential pamphlet Free Space: A Perspective on the Small Group in Women's Liberation, in which she outlined a four-stage method of consciousness raising. The work was influenced by humanistic psychology.
She was editor for the newspaper of the Union Women's Alliance to Gain Equality (Union WAGE).[11] She was also involved with the Bridal Fair action of 1969, the Miss America protest, and International Women's Day.
She changed her name from Pamela Allen to Chude Pamela Allen.
Allen collaborated with her first husband on the 1974 book Reluctant Reformers: Racism and Social Reform Movements in the United States. She also writes poetry and has drafted two plays, The Uprising of the 20,000 and Could We Be Heard.[1]
^M. Rivka Polatnick (Spring 1996). "Diversity in Women's Liberation Ideology: How a Black and a White Group of the 1960s Viewed Motherhood". Signs. 21 (3): 679–706. doi:10.1086/495102. JSTOR3175175. S2CID143903212.
