Other magazine features followed, including “Women Photographers and Their Work,” published in The Delineator, November 1901. It was the Allens’ success in publishing that particularly impressed the author, Juan Abel, who noted: “the prices they realize for their pictures should be an incentive to other women to follow in the same line of work. The field is a large one, and publishers are ever ready to pay good prices for pictures which they can use to advantage.… There is no reason why women should not obtain more of the photographic work for newspapers and magazines than they do. With Mrs. Käsebier, Miss Johnson [sic], Mrs. Wiggins, Miss Ben Yusuf and the Misses Allen, the list of women who do photographic illustrating continuously for magazines is almost complete, while the demand is unending…. The Misses Allen, while working mainly for profit, have still sufficient love for photography to make pictures for their own sake, more especially landscapes and fragments of old Colonial spots, so abundant round their home.”
The article was illustrated with two photographs credited to “Misses Allen”: “Mother and I,” a toddler happily standing on a woman’s lap, and “Bread and Milk” their towheaded nephew, Carl, about to swallow a spoonful of gruel.31
Photographs courtesy of Memorial Hall Museum, Deerfield, MA.
