© Standiford.

Miss Florence Allen.

Miss Allen's fame means less to her than what she believes it stand for. Men elsewhere may raise eyebrows at the notion of a woman for the high Federal bench, but here in Ohio they have long quit discounting her sex. The men of the State - politicians, business men, labor leaders, all - have found that she is mentally vigorous, daring, cool, thoroughly honest, and less swayed in office by partisan or material considerations than most men.

She has been elected a judge three times, always with increasing certainty. Women still fight for her as the great woman trail blazer, but there is less to fight. To millions of Ohioans she is more a strong and able judge than a woman.

Florence Ellinwood Allen, 50 this March, is in her twelfth year on the State Supreme Court, to which she has been twice elected. She left a musical career at the call of the first national suffrage campaigns, and these led her into the law, a profession then masculine. It seemed to her that "there were more important issues in life than piano playing."

As a suffragist she learned about practical politics from the bosses and the liquor crowd as well as from her sister campaigners. She is no more a dilettante at it than at law. In both she has proved her capability so often that there is no surprise in Ohio at seeing her nominated to the Federal bench.

Her Law Studies.

After a course at Western Reserve, Miss Allen went to Berlin with her sister Esther to study music. Returning to Cleveland, she became a music critic and a teacher, but not for long. Woman's suffrage and other social issues were in the air. She found herself making speeches to small groups on the questions of the day. There were two years of law study at the University of Chicago, then a period of social work among immigrants in New York. She took part in Manhattan suffrage rallies, won a law degree at New York University, then came home to Ohio with fire for the suffrage torches.

Her feelings on behalf of her sex were strengthened by her difficulty in finding a law berth in Cleveland. Her father had many friends who were lawyers here, but courtesy was all they gave his daughter; the law seemed completely a man's game; no office wanted a woman solicitor, junior, or even clerk. The directors of the Cleveland Legal Aid Society, organized to fight poor people's court battles, were more generous, and Miss Allen moved into a room with a desk and two chairs in their modest offices as the league's attorney.

She became the outstanding suffrage lawyer and one of the Cleveland league's campaign leaders. "Don't be emotional; it's what the men expect us to do - fight this on the facts," was her counsel. In 1916 three Ohio cities gave the municipal ballot to women. The prerogative was challenged. Florence Allen took up the fight. When the elections authorities ruled out the women's votes she carried the case to the Ohio Supreme Court and won it on law.

Other Legal Battles.

State Senator James A. Reynolds threw in his lot with suffrage and got a law permitting women to vote for President. The city political organizations, backed by the liquor sellers, circulated a referendum on it. Miss Allen challenged the petitions, took them into court and proved them shot through with fraud and forgery.

When, in the war year 1918, women ran the Cleveland street cars and then, in 1919, were roughly

There she was a success. On her first appearance in criminal court she had a gang of burglars sent to prison, and on her first assignment to the grand jury she had six indictments returned for murder, five of which resulted in convictions. A year in the prosecutor's office was enough to build a solid reputation. In 1920 she was elected to the Common Pleas bench.

In criminal court, it was her lot to draw the trial of Frank Motto, head of a cold-blooded gang of killers, who, with four confederates, had slain two manufacturers in broad daylight in a pay-roll robbery. Motto was convicted and Judge Allen sentenced him to the electric chair.

Sentenced a Judge.

It was her court which convicted a judge of perjury. To his protests that the conviction had been unfair Judge Allen, rising behind the bench, replied soberly: "You have had indeed a fair trial. It is a shocking thing when a judge of your high office is shown to have betrayed the truth and his honor, and I sentence you to the penitentiary."

Corporate lawyers discovered that Judge Allen would listen to lawsuits through which many judges might nap; that she was not afraid of the political consequences of a legal but unpopular decision. In 1922, running as a non-partisan, she was elected to the Ohio Supreme Court, and in 1928 was reelected.

Judge Allen has a distinctly liberal record here, achieved principally in utilities and labor issues. During her first term and in part of the second she was in a regular minority of three in many decisions. Since 1932, when other Democrats won places on the court, she has been more often in a liberal majority.

Her Political Contests.

She essayed to capture a United States Senate seat in 1926, but Atlee Pomerene, who contested the Democratic nomination with her, had all the best of the city organizations, which held against Miss Allen as "too dry." In 1932 she came within 19,000 votes of defeating Congressman Chester C. Bolton.

The death of two brothers in the World War helped to make Miss Allen one of the best-known peace orators in the nation. She has worked tirelessly for the League of Nations, the World Court, disarmament and world pacts. "No more war" is as ardent a principle to her today as suffrage was fifteen years ago. She is not an avowed pacifist, but has worked and spoken for international law, which will place the overt act of warfare on the same outlawed basis as is the overt act of personal assault.

In 1928 the zealous Massachusetts D. A. R. placed her on its famous blacklist. That did not upset her; she is a member of the D. A. R. herself, and her mother was a State regent in Utah.

One of Judge Allen's most famous speeches was made at the Conference on the Cause and Cure of War at Washington in 1925, in which she said: "We have to change the slogan, 'The State can do no wrong'; we have to write a new law; we must say, 'The State shall do no wrong.' And that thing can be done for America by the women in this room, and I grant you that we have great odds against us."

Her Hopes for Women.

Judge Allen is popular for her common sense, her faith that women can help public thought and life by greater participation of them, and her suppression of anything which might be misunderstood as feminine coyness, modesty, conceit of Pollyannishness. She said the other day:

"The finest thing about women in the court is that they establish to all that our courts are for women as well as for men. A vast majority of women will always be the makers of happy homes, although their increasing activity while wives and mothers, in our social and political institutions is making them better home makes. Do professional women lower the standard of home life? No, indeed; as they do well in their professions, they raise the standard.

"Is there prejudice against women in public life? There is a certain amount both in favor and against women, one as unreasoning as the other. I think in certain ways women have changed American politics for the better - particularly in their participation in juries. You can hardly judge women's effect on politics merely from the action of individual women officeholders. We don't judge men's effect on politics in such a manner. And it will take a long time for women's effect on politics to register so that we may properly appraise it. But the constant filtering into the home of information about government, through mothers now as well as fathers, is making itself felt."