Allinson, Anne Crosby Emery (1871 - 1932)
Role: Second Dean of Women's College (Pembroke)Dates: 1900 - 1905
Portrait Location: Alumnae Hall 104
Artist: Poole, Abram (1882 - 1961)
Portrait Date:
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 35
Framed Dimensions: 42 1/2
Brown Portrait Number: 109
Brown Historical Property Number: 430
Anne Crosby Emery was born on Hancock Point, on the coast of Maine. She graduated from Bryn Mawr College in 1892 and then studied abroad for two years on the institution's prestigious "European Scholarship." After studying at the University of Leipzig, she returned to Bryn Mawr, earning a Ph.D. in 1896 with a dissertation entitled The Historical Present in Early Latin. She remained at Bryn Mawr one more year to teach and serve as secretary to the president before becoming the first dean of women at the University of Wisconsin, where there were 400 female students. Three years later she accepted the position of dean of the Women's College at Brown, where 149 female students were enrolled. While she was the second dean of women named at Brown, her appointment attracted great notice as she was the first woman named to that position.
When Emery married Francis Greenleaf Allinson in 1905, she resigned her position at Brown but continued her writing, publishing Roads from Rome in 1913, Children of the Way in 1923, and Friends with Life in 1924. In 1926 she became editor of the women's page of The Providence Evening Bulletin and ran a regular column entitled "The Distaff." She remained affiliated with Brown, giving public lectures on contemporary literature and even serving again as acting dean of Pembroke College 1921-1923. Lewis died at her summer home in Maine in 1932.
Chicago-born artist Abram Poole studied in Paris and Munich for nearly a decade before returning to the east coast of the United States. He was living in New York at the time he painted Allinson's portrait.