[2] Allen joined Emmeline Pankhurst's Women's Social and Political Union, becoming an organiser in the South West, and later in Edinburgh.

She was imprisoned three times in 1909 for smashing windows, including at the Inland Revenue and Liberal Club in Bristol and at the Home Office,[2] twice went on hunger-strike, and was force-fed on the last occasion, for which she was awarded a Hunger Strike Medal 'for Valour' by Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence.

[6] The WPS changed their name to the Women's Auxiliary Service (WAS) and, with minor modifications to their uniform, carried on as before, setting up a further training school in Edinburgh.

Despite no longer being recognised by the authorities, Allen was invited by the Government to travel to Germany and advise on the policing of the British Army of the Rhine.

During the General Strike of 1926 Allen was involved with the Organisation for the Maintenance of Supplies and turned her Women's Auxiliary Service over to the strike-breaking movement.

She did nothing to discourage the impression, and made contact with police chiefs and political leaders all over Europe.The Home Office began to take an interest in Allen's activities in 1927.

Home Office records covering the period 1927–1934 reveal that she kept dossiers on people she suspected of activities connected with vice and white slavery.

Allen met a number of fascist leaders abroad, including Eoin O'Duffy in Ireland, Franco in Spain, Mussolini in Italy, and Hitler and Göring in Germany.

Although her links to Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists were unofficial until 1939, she engaged in various militant activities, including the formation of the Women's Reserve in 1933, which was intended to resist leftist sedition and insurrection.

Following the outbreak of World War II Allen joined the Women's Voluntary Service but also became a regular speaker at BUF peace rallies.

There were also questions in the House of Commons from the Labour MP Glenvil Hall in June 1940 as to whether Allen's continued nominal presence on the Advisory Council of the Women's Voluntary Service represented a security risk.

[9] Eventually however she was placed under light detention as a precaution, being restricted to within a five-mile radius of her Cornwall home and banned from using cars, bicycles, telephones and the wireless.

Her friends included Margaret Damer Dawson, Isobel Goldingham and Helen Bourn Tagart, all of whom she met in her policing days.

It was written at the time when Allen met Hitler, and her political views are made plain: she was at a crossroads in her life because she was looking at fascism as a solution to the world problems that she perceived.

They both turned to animal activism after the demise of the Mosley movement, being staunch anti-vivisectionists and members of the London and Provincial Anti-Vivisection Society.