Sheila Allen, who has died aged 78, was a feminist, a socialist, and an internationalist. Appointed the new University of Bradford's first woman professor, of sociology in 1972, she defended minorities, blazed trails and broke silences in academic research on racism and women. There was a commitment, a passion, about Sheila that ensured success; she knew how to mobilise support, she knew how to deal with bureaucracies.
Sheila set up Bradford's Ethnicity and Social Policy Research Centre, which developed over four decades' experience in sociology and analysis to become one of the leading interdisciplinary institutions in its field. A 1971 article in Race & Class located Sheila as among the first academics to highlight the presence of, and problems faced by, migrant women arriving in Britain of their own volition. Such women, she pointed out, faced systems set up by men, and for men. She examined the situation of home workers and recognised their role as entrepreneurs. In another R&C piece, Race and the Economy (1973), Sheila was probably the first academic to apply, in Britain, the American concept of institutional racism.
She was born in Gilberdyke, East Yorkshire. Her father was unemployed and her daughter Sophie remembers Sheila joking, when a television programme about living in a second world war house was shown, that wartime austerity was a step up in her family's standard of living. But Sheila's mother, committed to education, encouraged her daughter, who won a scholarship to Sleaford grammar school and scraped every penny together to pay for her daughter's uniform. Getting into grammar school was an almost insurmountable barrier for most bright youngsters at the time, including Sheila's elder brother. He had been unable to take up his scholarship - for want of the money for his uniform.
It was her mother, too, who encouraged Sheila to go on to the London School of Economics, which her father had suggested was pointless for a girl. At the LSE she took a degree, and a postgraduate course in anthropology, researched in south-east Asia and became a senior research assistant. She took a teaching post at Birmingham University and, at Leicester University, founded a group to counter racism in the community. That project, in various forms, became a lifelong commitment.
Then, in 1966, came Bradford. Four years later she became director of the Youth and Work: Differential Ethnic Experience project. In the mid-70s she was part of the group of feminists who set up one of the first women's studies masters courses. The course combined analysis with practical work, seeking out students who had experienced women's problems in the workplace.
Sheila never forgot the barriers that children like her had faced and often still face; hence that commitment to the defence, and extension, of equality. She was a co-founder of the university nursery and of a part-time evening-studies degree. Not long before she died, she expressed her concern about the impact that the abolition of grants has had upon who goes to university and, in particular, about whether mature students have the means to study.
Sheila was to become coordinator of the university's equal opportunity policies, and pro-vice-chancellor, but what she was to me was amazing role model. As a young lecturer, in my first job, I found her to be a rock on which many of us depended. In the darkest moments, she was always there, available and willing and able to give good advice which always came with kindness, often with a cup of tea and frequently with dinner in her lovely warm kitchen.
Sheila was invaluable in helping me through the 1970s educational cuts, when Bradford closed several departments and when most of us felt, with good reason, vulnerable and unprotected. Supportive without being patronising, she helped turn all of us, as well as her own daughters, into independent, self-reliant women. She helped the careers of many women, including me. She leaves a huge gap in academia, in the heart of feminism and in the hearts of many feminists in Britain.
Sheila's marriage ended in divorce. She is survived by two daughters and three grandchildren.