Special to THE NEW YORK TIMES. WASHINGTON, March 6. - President Roosevelt today nominated Miss Florence E. Allen of Cleveland to be judge of the Sixth Circuit Court. She is the first woman to be named to a judgeship of this rank. Miss Allen succeeds Judge Smith Hickenlooper, who died recently. Florence E. Allen was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, on March 23, 1884, the daughter of Clarence Emir and Corinne Marie Allen. In addition to her eminence as a lawyer, she was known as a crusader for the rights of women in professional and public life. Her father was a teacher at Western Reserve University and later at a Congregational School in Salt Lake City, and began teaching his daughter Latin and Greek when she was only 7 years old. Later she attended New Lyme Institute, Ashtabula County, Ohio, Salt Lake College and Western Reserve, where she received a degree of A.B. in 1904 and an A.M. in 1908. From 1904 to 1906 she served as assistant correspondent in Berlin for The Musical Courier, a New York publication. While studying for her master's degree she was a musical critic for The Cleveland Plain Dealer. Because women were barred from the law school of Western Reserve, she went to the University of Chicago, then to New York University, where she received an LL.B. in 1913. While studying law here she did legal work for the New York League for the Protection of Immigrants and delivered lectures on music for the Board of Education. She was admitted to the bar in Ohio in 1914. Her public career began five years later, when she was appointed assistant prosecutor for Cuyahoga County. After two |
years in this post she was elected to the Court of Common Pleas by the largest vote ever given a candidate for that office. Judge Allen is a Democrat but both her elections to judgeships were on a nonpartisan ticket. She never married. She served at various times as assistant secretary of the National College Equal Suffrage Association, as a member of the executive board of the Ohio Woman Suffrage Association, and as a trustee of Western Reserve University. In 1925 at Smith College she received the honorary degree of LL.D. She is a member of the D.A.R., Sigma Pai, Kappa Beta Pi, and the Women's City and Business Women's Clubs of Cleveland. |
