Florence Ellinwood Allen

Florence Ellinwood Allen (March 23, 1884 – September 12, 1966) was a United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. She was the first woman to serve on a state supreme court and one of the first two women to serve as a United States federal judge. In 2005, she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame. Early life and education Allen was born on March 23, 1884, in Salt Lake City, Utah, the daughter of Clarence Emir Allen Sr., a mine manager, and later United States Representative from Utah, and his wife Corinne Marie, née Tuckerman. She was one of seven children—five girls, one of whom died in infancy, and two boys. Her father was a professor and a linguist, and the family moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where he was hired by what was then called the Western Reserve University and is today called Case Western Reserve University. Young Florence grew up in Cleveland, where her father shared his love of languages with her, teaching her Greek and Latin before she was a teenager. She also showed an early love of poetry, as well as a talent for music, and after attending New Lyme Institute in Ashtabula, Ohio, she decided to attend Western Reserve, with music as her major. Allen graduated in 1904 with a Bachelor of Arts degree, and her father then sent her to Berlin, German Empire, to continue her musical studies. While she was there, she worked as a correspondent for a New York magazine called the Musical Courier. Her original plan was to become a concert pianist but she sustained an injury that cut her music career short. She returned to Ohio in 1906 and took a job as the music critic for The Plain Dealer (Cleveland, Ohio) newspaper, a position she held till 1909. By this time, she had begun showing an increasing interest in politics and law, which led her to take a Master of Arts degree in political science from Western Reserve; she completed it in 1908. She also took courses in constitutional law, and would have pursued a degree, but at that time, Western Reserve's law school did not admit women. So Allen took special classes and tutorials, and became more determined to have a legal career. She attended the law school at the University of Chicago for a year, and then transferred to New York University School of Law. In order to pay her tuition, she found work as a legal investigator and researcher for the New York League for the Protection of Immigrants.