During 1948, the year this holiday card was sent out to friends and family, Florence Allen was serving as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, a position President Franklin D. Roosevelt nominated her for in 1934. This appointment would make her the first female in American history to serve as an Article III judge.

In this same year she was honored by New York University Law School, her alma mater, as “one of the world’s most truly great women” at the Hotel Waldorf-Astoria in New York City. Allen spoke at the event that evening and “asserted that lawyers have a positive obligation to explain to the peoples who control the national governments the crucial necessity for building up a system of law between the nations as a substitute for war.”