Florence Ellinwood Allen was born on March 23, 1884, in Salt Lake City, Utah, the daughter of Clarence Emir Allen and Corinne Marie Tuckerman Allen. Her father was a classical scholar who later managed mining interests and served a term as a United States Representative from Utah; her mother was active in local civic affairs. The family had moved to Utah in the early 1880s in hopes of improving her father’s health. Allen grew up with a strong education at home. Her father taught her Greek and Latin before she reached her teens, and she showed early aptitude for music, poetry, and outdoor pursuits. She attended the New Lyme Institute in Ashtabula County, Ohio, and Salt Lake College before entering the Women’s College of Western Reserve University in Cleveland in 1900 at the age of sixteen. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1904.
After college she spent two years in Berlin studying piano, with the intention of pursuing a concert career. An injury and a reassessment of her prospects led her to abandon that path. Returning to Cleveland, she worked as a music critic for the Cleveland Plain Dealer from 1906 to 1909 and taught at Laurel School. At the same time she completed a master’s degree in political science at Western Reserve in 1908. A professor’s suggestion turned her toward the law. Western Reserve’s law school refused to admit women, so she enrolled at the University of Chicago in 1909. She spent a year there, ranking second in her class as one of the few women present, then transferred to New York University School of Law. She received her law degree in 1913, again finishing second in her class, and was admitted to the Ohio bar the following year.
While building a private practice in Cleveland and working with the Legal Aid Society, Allen became deeply involved in the woman suffrage movement. In New York she had met leaders of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, including Carrie Chapman Catt, and she took on organizing work for the College Equal Suffrage League. Back in Ohio she campaigned vigorously during the unsuccessful 1912 and 1914 attempts to amend the state constitution to grant women the vote. She spoke, debated, and raised funds across the state. In 1916 she successfully argued before the Ohio Supreme Court in defense of a provision in the East Cleveland city charter that allowed women to vote in municipal elections. That victory and the public recognition it brought helped establish her reputation.
In 1919 she was appointed assistant prosecutor of Cuyahoga County, becoming the first woman to hold such a post in Ohio. The next year, shortly after ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, she was elected judge of the Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas, the first woman elected to a judicial office of general jurisdiction in the United States. On that bench she handled nearly nine hundred cases. Among them were several murder trials. In 1921 she presided over the trial of Frank Motto, convicted of killing two men in a robbery, and sentenced him to death, making her the first woman in the country both to conduct a first-degree murder trial and to impose a capital sentence.
In 1922 Allen ran for a seat on the Supreme Court of Ohio. Supported by networks of women organized into Florence Allen Clubs in counties across the state, she defeated a well-backed opponent and became the first woman elected to a state court of last resort in the United States. She took office in January 1923 and was reelected in 1928 by a margin of roughly 350,000 votes. During her eleven years on the court she participated in the full range of the court’s docket. She also made unsuccessful bids for higher political office, losing a Democratic primary contest for the United States Senate and, in 1932, a race for the House of Representatives.
On March 6, 1934, President Franklin D. Roosevelt nominated her to the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit to fill the seat vacated by Judge Smith Hickenlooper. The Senate confirmed her on March 15, and she received her commission on March 21. She was the first woman appointed to an Article III federal judgeship. (Genevieve Rose Cline had earlier been named to the United States Customs Court, an Article I tribunal.) Some members of the bar and bench privately objected that a woman on the court would diminish its standing, but the appointment stood. Allen served actively until 1959. In 1958 she became chief judge of the circuit, the first woman to hold that position on a federal court of appeals, serving in the role for several months before taking senior status on October 5, 1959. She continued to sit as a senior judge until her death.
One of her notable assignments was service on a three-judge district court that upheld the constitutionality of the Tennessee Valley Authority. Throughout her judicial career she insisted that cases be assigned without regard to the judge’s sex; when she discovered she was being excluded from patent matters, she demanded and received a full share of that docket. She was periodically mentioned as a possible nominee to the United States Supreme Court, particularly during the Roosevelt years, but no such appointment occurred.
Allen never married and had no children. Outside the courtroom she wrote and lectured on constitutional questions, international law, and the history of the suffrage movement in Ohio. Her published works include This Constitution of Ours (1940), The Treaty as an Instrument of Legislation (1952), an account of the Ohio woman suffrage campaign, and her memoir To Do Justly (1965). She received numerous honorary degrees and, decades after her death, was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame. She advocated the development of international legal institutions capable of resolving disputes between nations and maintained an interest in pacific settlement of conflicts.
In her later years she lived in Waite Hill, Ohio. After a fall that broke her hip and a period of declining health, she died on September 12, 1966, at the age of eighty-two. She is buried in the Waite Hill Village Cemetery. Her career consisted of a succession of positions never before held by a woman: assistant prosecutor, trial judge of a court of general jurisdiction, justice of a state supreme court, judge and then chief judge of a federal court of appeals. Each step was taken by election or appointment in an era when formal barriers and informal resistance remained strong, and each demonstrated that the work of judging could be performed without regard to the sex of the person wearing the robe.