Allinson, Anne Crosby Emery

Anne Crosby Emery Allinson (1871-1932), second dean (and first woman dean) of the Women’s College, was Miss Emery when she took office at the Women’s College in September 1900. She was born in Hancock Point, Maine, on January 1, 1871. A graduate of Bryn Mawr in 1892, she studied abroad for two years on the “European scholarship,” the highest honor that could be won by a Bryn Mawr student. After study at the University of Leipzig, she returned to Bryn Mawr to receive her Ph.D. degree in 1896, writing a thesis, The Historical Present in Early Latin. She taught a year at Bryn Mawr and was secretary to the president. In 1897 she became assistant professor of classical philology and the first dean of women at the University of Wisconsin., which had four hundred women students. In 1900, when she became dean, the Women’s College at Brown had only 149 students. Upon her marriage to Francis Greenleaf Allinson in 1905 she resigned as dean to be a homemaker and step-mother to Susanne Allinson, who later married Mrs. Allinson’s brother, Henry Emery. With her husband’s encouragement she continued her writing and collaborated with him in writing Greek Lands and Letters. She also published Roads from Rome in 1913, Children of the Way in 1923, and Friends with Life in 1924. She was called back to serve as dean in 1921 and remained through the first semester of 1923-24. She was the first president of the Plantations Club and continued in that office for sixteen years until her death. She led a campaign for a building and auditorium for the Club, which was built in 1926 at Abbott Park Place. In 1925 she was elected member-at-large of the Providence School Committee, and served until 1931, when she declined to seek reelection. While a school committee member, she was elected president of the Rhode Island Association of Public School Officials. She also wrote book reviews and gave public lectures on contemporary literature at Brown. In the fall of 1926 she became editor of the women’s page of the Providence Evening Bulletin, and her column, “The Distaff,” appeared for the next six years. In 1929 a building at the University of Wisconsin was named for her. Mrs. Allinson was killed in a tragic accident in Ellsworth, Maine, near her summer home at Hancock Point, August 16, 1932. In noting her death, the Pembroke Alumnae News Letter said: “Mrs. Allinson enriched the lives of Brown Alumnae in countless ways. ... She saw life around her and the world of the intellect with such breadth of understanding, such sanity, sincerity, and kindliness that she broadened our intellectual horizons and strengthened our faith in the value of human relationships."