Allen, Donna (19 Aug. 1920-19 July 1999), labor economist and historian, feminist, and peace and civil rights activist, was born Donna Rehkopf in Petoskey, Michigan, the daughter of Caspar Rehkopf, a metallurgical engineer, and Louise Densmore, a schoolteacher. Encouraged by her parents to excel, Donna from an early age displayed a great intellectual energy and optimism. Like her mother, Donna went to college at a time when few women did. She attended Duke University, majoring in history and economics, and graduated in 1943, having married Russell Allen the previous year. The couple would have four children. That same year, she volunteered to work as a cryptographer at Arlington Hall, Virginia, headquarters of the U.S. Army's Signal Intelligence Service, and her husband went into the army. In 1946 both Allens embarked on master's degrees in economics at the University of Chicago. From 1946 to 1948 Donna worked as a legislative assistant to the Illinois senator Paul H. Douglass and wrote briefs for labor boards during President Harry S. Truman's administration. Donna and Russell supported the Progressive Party's Henry Wallace in his run for President in 1948 as well as Highlander Folk School, the pioneering integrationist labor and community-organizing school in Tennessee, even as the country turned toward cold war militarism and an era of cultural conformity that placed increasing limits on women.

In 1949 Russell became research and education director for the pulp and papermakers union, and the family moved to Albany, New York. In 1952 Donna finished her thesis on collective bargaining under the Railway Labor Act and received her master's degree from the University of Chicago. After the family moved to Schenectady, New York, from 1953 to 1955 she taught at Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations and began writing Fringe Benefits: Wages or Social Obligation? (1965).

In 1957 the family moved to Washington, D.C., where Russell took a job as a labor educator and economist for the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), and Donna became a board member of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). In 1960 she joined the staff of the Vermont representative William H. Meyer, to assist his campaign against nuclear weapons proliferation, and when the United States and the Soviet Union ended their truce against atmospheric nuclear testing in 1961, she became one of the founders of Women Strike for Peace. In a time of repression of dissent, she increasingly became a popular speaker on issues of the day, and her energetic and personal style of speaking recruited many new people into movements for change.

As an economist, Donna researched and wrote about the economics of disarmament and peace, testified before Congress, and participated in national and international conferences--including the International Arms Control and Disarmament Symposium in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in January 1964, and the Conference on Economic Aspects of Disarmament in Vienna, in December 1964. After the Vienna conference, she went to Paris, France, where she was arrested in a fifteen-nation European demonstration against a nuclear-armed North Atlantic Treaty Organization. In 1964 the U.S. House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) subpoenaed Donna Allen and two others for their peace activities. They refused to testify when required to do it in closed hearings, and the government tried them for contempt. A U.S. district court gave them suspended sentences of four to twelve months in jail on 4 June 1966, but a court of appeals overturned the sentence in 1966, after Allen went on a national speaking tour in defense of civil liberties and peace. In December 1965 she began full-time work as the Washington, D.C., representative of the National Committee to Abolish HUAC. She participated in civil rights activities and wrote a pamphlet, titled "What's Wrong with the War in Vietnam," that drew parallels between the brutal treatment of southern blacks and Vietnamese peasants. Allen continued to travel across the country and was well received as a well-reasoned and energetic speaker. Her home in Washington, D.C., became a strategy center for movement activists. In August 1965 she and thirty others called for an Assembly of Unrepresented People to organize opposition to the war and southern segregation, and she helped organize the dramatic confrontation between peace demonstrators and soldiers that took place at the Pentagon on 21 October 1967. She joined the Jeanette Rankin Brigade for peace, the Poor People's Campaign, and the campaign for statehood for the District of Columbia.

Allen from childhood believed in the right of each person to speak for him- or herself and adopted the radical notion that in a democracy everyone should have equal access to the means of communication. She and her daughter Dana later wrote, "The time has come for a radical re-evaluation of the role of the mass media in our society--politically. We all experience the power of mass media over our decisions due to its massive outreach. Yet we know that no democracy can survive where a few men have such immense political power relative to others" (www.wifp.org/radicalfeministanalysis.html). Through her experiences as an activist, she increasingly confronted the issue of a mass media monopoly, whereby a few corporations disproportionately owned and controlled the means of communication. She said the mass media should be a means of communication rather than a means of governing and criticized the failure of the mass media to allow people to speak for themselves. She researched the economic concentration of media ownership and argued that the lack of an easily accessible free press, as envisioned by the country's founders, threatened the foundations of democracy.

For the rest of her life, Allen energetically pressed for new ways to create financially viable forms of alternative media, explored theories of media democracy, and took up innovative campaigns to organize women to create a more participatory communications system. In the midst of her many activities, she earned a Ph.D. in history from Howard University in 1971, writing a dissertation on how the mass media diverted public sentiment from supporting national health insurance after World War II. In 1972 Allen founded the Women's Institute for Freedom of the Press, assisted by her daughter Martha Leslie Allen. They dedicated the institute to "expanding the ability to communicate and to finding ways to enable each of us to speak for ourselves" (http://www.wifp.org/radicalfeministanalysis.html). They did this in part by establishing their own means of communication. Donna edited the Media Report to Women from 1972 to 1987, then transferring it to a new owner; Martha Allen continued to edit the Directory of Women's Media, reporting on the many ways that women enlarged the space for a more democratic communications system. Working long hours without pay, Allen housed the Women's Institute in her home as she and Martha raised income by typesetting, developed internships for women students studying media democracy, and organized international teleconferences.

As a feminist labor economist, historian, and indefatigable activist, Allen galvanized many women to seek a more democratic communications system that, she hoped, would reinvigorate American democracy and bring an end to poverty, racism, and war.

Donna Allen's papers are at the National Women and Media Collection, University of Missouri, Columbia, Missouri. Her works, Fringe Benefits: Wages or Social Obligation? (1965, rev. ed.1969), and "Inadequate Media and the Failure of the National Health Insurance Proposal in the Late 1940s" (Ph.D. diss., Howard University, 1971), created the academic groundwork for her campaigns for expanded communication rights. In Ramona R. Rush, Carol E. Oukrop, and Pamela J. Creedon, eds., Seeking Equity for Women in Journalism and Mass Communication Education: A 30-Year Update (2004), Martha Allen provides a biographical sketch, and other media educators describe how Donna Allen challenged and encouraged women to join in a communications revolution. Also see Danna L. Walker, "Reason and Radicalism: The History of Donna Allen and Women's Activism in Media" (Ph.D. diss., University of Maryland, 2003); Donna Allen, Ramona R. Rush, Susan J. Kaufman, eds., Women Transforming Communications: Global Intersections (1996); and Ramona R. Rush and Donna Allen, eds., Communications at the Crossroads: The Gender Gap Connection (1989).

• Donna Allen's essay, with her daughter Dana, on women and media democracy can be found on the web site of the Women's Institute for Freedom of the Press, at
  http://www.wifp.org/radicalfeministanalysis.html.