What do we know about the first woman judge in the United States?

When Tracy Thomas first joined the faculty of the University of Akron School of Law, the dean assumed she must know all about their local heroine, Judge Florence Allen.

“She was literally staring at me from my classroom,” says Thomas. “There was a picture of Florence Allen on one of our old concrete wall classrooms.”

Born in 1884, Florence Allen would chalk up many firsts. In 1918, she became the first female prosecutor in Ohio. In 1920, she became the first female judge in Ohio when she won election to the Cuyahoga County Common Police Court in Cleveland. In 1922, she was elected to become the nation’s first woman to serve on a state supreme court. And in 1934, she was appointed by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to sit on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit, the first woman to be a federal appellate judge. She even came within a hair’s breadth of being nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court, by two different presidents.

But who was Florence Allen, and why did it take so long for her successors to make it to the bench? After her retirement in 1959, the next woman to be appointed to the 6th Circuit was in 1979. Although she joined the Ohio Supreme Court in 1922, another woman wouldn’t serve on that court until the 1980s.

In her new book, The First Woman Judge: The Life and Legacy of Florence Allen, Thomas delves into Allen’s suffragette connections, her political ambitions, and the two women who would be her life partners. She shares how Thomas navigated in a world of men, and built a base of support from women of both political parties.

In this episode of the Modern Law Library, Thomas and host Lee Rawles talk about the responses of Allen’s judicial colleagues to her ascending the bench (one took to his bed for two days); her defense of another female judge during the Lavender Scare; and why she ended up having to hear so many tax and patent cases.