Florence Ellinwood Allen
(1884-1966)

Florence Ellinwood Allen, the daughter of Clarence Emir and Corinne Marie (Tuckerman) Allen, was born on March 23, 1884, in Salt Lake City, Utah. Her father was a professor of Latin and Greek at Western Reserve University. After a move to Utah, he became the state's first Congressman. Her mother, was one of the first students to matriculate at Smith College, although she never finished to graduate. Allen's ancestors include on the paternal side Ethan Allen, the American Revolutionary soldier who heroically led the Green Mountain Boys in the capture of Fort Ticonderoga. Her maternal ancestors can be traced back to Dr. Samuel Fuller of the Mayflower.¹

Judge Allen received a colorful education. She attended New Lyme Institute in Ashtabula County, Ohio from 1895-1897 and Salt Lake College, 1897-1899. Judge Allen was tutored by her father in the classics at an early age which resulted in her being ready to begin college at the age of fifteen. Her mother was an accomplished musician which accounted for her lifelong love of music. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio in 1904. For the next two years, she studied and worked in Berlin, Germany, improving her skill as a pianist and writing music criticism for U. S. newspapers.

After adventures abroad, she returned and worked as the music editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer and a lecturer at Laurel School, while continuing her education at Western Reserve University. In 1908 she earned a masters degree in political science and constitutional law. When one of her Western Reserve professors suggested a career in law, she pursued the idea eagerly. Barred by her sex from attending Western Reserve University Law School, her first choice, Allen entered the University of Chicago Law School in 1909, the only woman in a class of 100. She finished the winter quarter second in her class, and her classmates complimented her on "thinking like a man." Allen's perception was a little different. She once said, "When women of intelligence recognize their share in and their responsibility for the courts, a powerful moral backing is secured for the administration of justice."²

After a year in Chicago, Allen left for New York to work with Frances Kellor in the settlement-house movement. She hoped to continue her legal education at Columbia, but Columbia University did not then admit women as full-time students, so she enrolled at New York University, where women were welcomed and awarded degrees even before the turn of the century.³ During her law school days in New York, Allen worked as an assistant to Maud Wood Park, the head of the National College Women's Equal Suffrage League. By the time she graduated, she already ranked as a suffrage movement leader. After graduating second in her class at New York University in June, 1913, Allen returned to Ohio to participate in the state suffrage campaign, study for the bar exam, and begin her legal practice. After a brief period with the Cleveland law firm of Bartholomew, Leeper & White, she opened her own practice which she devoted to legal aid and social reform work.⁴ When the suffragists won a victory in the City of East Cleveland, Allen successfully defended the city charter suffrage amendment before the Ohio Supreme Court.⁵

In 1919, in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, Allen was appointed assistant county prosecutor, the first woman in the country to hold such office. On November 6, 1920, ten weeks after the United States Constitution was amended to enfranchise women, Allen was elected to a five-year term as Judge of the Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas.⁶ It was the first election in Ohio in which women voted, except on local matters, and for the first time a woman was elected to sit on a court of general jurisdiction. At the time she was elected, there were only 84 women attorneys in Ohio, out of 6,500 lawyers.⁷ She received enthusiastic endorsements from Cleveland's liberal mayor and from local newspapers. In the end, she beat nine male opponents for the job and earned more votes than the three male judges who were also elected, in fact, she won "by the largest popular vote ever given a candidate for the bench in that county."⁸ At age 38 in 1922, Judge Allen ran for a seat on the Ohio Supreme Court. She received support from across party lines, "mostly from women" who formed "Florence Allen Clubs"⁹ throughout the state. Judge Allen became the first woman to serve on any state's highest court.

After two unsuccessful bids for federal legislative office in 1926 and 1932,¹⁰ Judge Allen was appointed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit on March 21, 1934. At age fifty, she become the first woman in the nation appointed to an Article III judgeship.¹¹ Judge Allen was a recognized authority on constitutional law and the law of patents. She presided over the path marking three-judge district court panel that adjudicated the constitutional challenge to the creation and maintenance of the Tennessee Valley Authority. The Supreme Court affirmed her judgment.¹²

During Judge Allen's tenure as a Circuit Judge, she was considered for appointment to the Supreme Court, but Allen herself was a realist.¹³ According to political strategist India Edwards, President Truman felt positively about nominating Allen to the Supreme Court, but he was discouraged by the negative reaction of the Chief Justice and the Associate Justices the Chief consulted. The justices feared that a woman's presence would inhibit their conference deliberations where they "meet informally with robes, and perhaps shoes, off, shirt collars unbuttoned and discussed their problems and came to decisions."¹⁴ Judge Allen herself believed that she was not nominated because she was politically too independent. After joining the court, she lost her connections in the Democratic party. Since there was no political advantage for a president or a political party to appoint her, Judge Allen was never nominated.¹⁵ She accurately predicted that a female Supreme Court appointment "will never happen while I am living."¹⁶

On September 17, 1958, Judge Allen became the first woman to serve as Chief Judge of a federal appeals court. After twenty-five years on the court, Allen relinquished the position of Chief Judge on February 5, 1959,¹⁷ and on October 5, she became a Senior United States Circuit Judge.

Judge Allen was a true pioneer in the fields of law and women's rights. She served as Assistant Secretary of the National Collegiate Equal Suffrage League from 1911 to 1915 and she was a member of the executive board of the Ohio Woman Suffrage Association. Prior to 1920 she drove through Ohio and other states in a horse and buggy, speaking to groups of people wherever she found them--whether at the stands of the "medicine men" who in those days peddled patent medicines, or at political rallies, or at door steps, about the great inequity which denied women the right to vote--about the justice of their demands for enfranchisement, the right to hold public office, and the right to equal opportunities.¹⁸ The most memorable of her addresses were those she gave on the "outlawry of war" before the Conference on the Cause and Cure of War held in Washington, D.C., in 1925 and before the International Bar Association meeting at The Hague, the Netherlands, in 1948.¹⁹ Judge Allen was one of the first to discuss at international meetings the necessity of an international law to govern the various aspects of the increasing exploration in outer space.

Judge Allen was for many years a trustee of Western Reserve University. The recipient of many honors, she was named the outstanding professional woman in the United States by the National Federation of Business Women's Clubs in 1926 and was presented with the National Achievement Award of Chi Omega, the national women's sorority, in 1938. The Albert Gallatin Medal of New York University was presented to her in 1960. In addition, honorary LL.D. degrees were conferred upon her by twenty-five of the nation's leading colleges and universities.²⁰ In 1960, the Judge Florence E. Allen Room at the New York University Law School was dedicated in her honor, and in 1966, the New York Women's Bar Association established the Florence Allen Award for presentation to outstanding women lawyers.

Recognized as an authority on international, constitutional, and patent law, Judge Allen held numerous positions of leadership in professional organizations. She served the International Bar Association as chairman of the section on human rights. She presided at the meetings of the section in London, England in 1950, in Madrid, Spain, in 1952, and in Monte Carlo in 1954. She was a fellow of the American Bar Association Foundation and served the American Bar Association as a member of the house of delegates in 1944 and of the resolutions committee in 1953-1954. She was chairman of the International Law Committee of the International Federation of Women Lawyers in 1954, and also a founding member of that association's committee on laws for outer space in 1958. In 1935, Judge Allen was vice-president of the National Federation of Business and Professional Women. She held memberships in Phi Beta Kappa, Kappa Beta Pi, Phi Lambda Theta, Delta Kappa Gamma, Kappa Delta Pi, The Order of the Coif, Daughters of the American Revolution, and the Women's City and Business Women's Clubs of Cleveland.

Judge Allen, who never married, had little interest in women's traditional pursuits. She commented frequently on the problems women faced in seeking acceptance by men. She stressed the necessity of working steadily and conscientiously. She also recommended a sense of humor, tact, and above all a lack of emotion.²¹Judge Allen loved reading, especially poetry, and she retained her interest in music throughout her life, playing the piano with professional competence. She was a lover of nature and enjoyed early morning walks with her dogs in the woods and mountains.

Judge Allen died at her home in Waite Hill, a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio, on September 12, 1966, at the age of 82.