ALLEN, FLORENCE ELLINWOOD 1884-1959

PIONEER WOMAN JUDGE

Background

As a teenager in Salt Lake City, Utah, Florence Ellinwood Allen attended a lecture by suffragist leader Susan B. Anthony. Subsequently, she became Anthony's protégé and a lifelong feminist activist. After attending the University of Chicago Law School (1909-1910) and graduating from New York University Law School in 1913, Allen was admitted to the Ohio bar in 1914 and established a law practice in Cleveland that specialized in legal problems of special concern to women. She was appointed assistant county prosecutor for Cuyahoga County in 1919.

Judicial Career

In 1921 Allen was the first woman in American history to become judge of a Common Pleas Court, and in 1926 she was the first female to be appointed associate justice on the Ohio State Supreme Court. Judge Allen was a "no-nonsense" jurist. In 1925 she imposed the death penalty on Frank Motto, a notorious Ohio gangster and murderer. She did not hesitate to sentence fellow judges to prison when they were caught in criminal wrongdoing.

Federal Court Judge

During the 1920s Allen cultivated a friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt, and in 1934 Mrs. Roosevelt convinced her husband, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, to appoint Allen as the first female judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals. When Associate Justice George Sunderland retired from the U.S. Supreme Court in late 1937, Allen was widely regarded as a potential successor, but Roosevelt nominated Sen. Hugo Black of Alabama.

Sources:

Florence Ellinwood Allen, To Do Justly (Cleveland: Western Reserve University Press, 1965);

Beverly Blair Cook, Entry on Allen, in Notable American Women: The Modern Period, edited by Barbara Sicherman and Carol Hurd Green, with the assistance of Ilene Kantrov and Harriette Walker (Cambridge, Mass. & London: Harvard University Press, 1980), pp. 11-13.