Queer Places:
Forest Home Cemetery
Mount Pleasant, Henry County, Iowa, USA
Arabella Mansfield (May 23, 1846 – August 1, 1911), born Belle Aurelia Babb,
was the first woman Certified lawyer in the United States in 1869, admitted to the Iowa bar; she made her career as a college educator and administrator. Despite an Iowa state law restricting the bar exam to males, Mansfield had taken it and earned high scores. Shortly after her court challenge, Iowa amended its licensing statute and became the first state to accept women and minorities into its bar.
During her career, Mansfield worked primarily as an educator and activist, teaching at Iowa Wesleyan College and DePauw University. At the latter, she also became a university administrator, serving successively as dean in the 1890s of two different schools.
Belle Aurelia Babb (known as Belle) was born in 1846 on a family farm in Benton Township, Des Moines County, Iowa, as the second child to Mary Moyer (1820-1895) and Miles Babb (1815–1852). Her older brother, Washington Irving Babb, born in 1844 and named after the prominent New York author, was her lifelong friend. While Belle was young, her father left for California April 10, 1850 on the Flint River Company wagon train. Prior to his departure he signed a will making provisions for the educations of his children. Miles became superintendent of the Bay State Mining Company and was killed in the collapse of a mining tunnel at the Mameluke Hill mine in El Dorado County, California Dec. 23, 1852.
Mary Babb moved with their two children to Mount Pleasant, Iowa, where they attended local schools. (Clara Foltz, the first woman lawyer to be accepted to the bar on the West Coast, also grew up in Mount Pleasant around this time.)
In 1862, Babb started her studies at Iowa Wesleyan College in Mount Pleasant. There she began using the name Arabella (previously, she had gone by her given name of Belle).[1] As many men were leaving to fight in the American Civil War, universities were admitting more women students and hiring them as teachers. Arabella Babb graduated in three years as valedictorian; her brother Washington Babb was salutatorian in the same class.
Babb taught at Des Moines Conference Seminary (now Simpson
College) in Indianola, Iowa for a year. She returned to Mount Pleasant to
marry her college sweetheart, John Melvin Mansfield (1842–1894), a young
professor at Iowa Wesleyan. He encouraged her in her ambition to study
law. Arabella Mansfield "read the law" as an apprentice in her brother
Washington's law office, after he had passed the bar and established his
practice. Although by Iowa law the bar exam was restricted to "males over
21," Arabella Mansfield took the exam in 1869, passing it with high
scores. In 1869, Iowa became the first state in the union to admit women
to the practice of law after Mansfield challenged the state law excluding
her. The Court ruled that women may not be denied the right to practice
law in Iowa, admitting Mansfield to the bar.[2] Mansfield was sworn in at
the Union Block building in Mount Pleasant that year.[3] Although admitted
to the bar, Mansfield did not practice law, concentrating on college
teaching and activist work. She taught at Iowa Wesleyan College, followed
by DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana. In 1893 she was selected as
Dean of the School of Art at DePauw, and in 1894 as Dean of the School of
Music. In 1893, Mansfield joined the National League of Women Lawyers.
Mansfield was also active in the women's suffrage movement, chairing the Iowa Women’s Suffrage Convention in 1870, and working with
Susan B. Anthony.
Mansfield died Aug. 1, 1911 at the home of her brother, Washington I. Babb, in Aurora, Illinois, before getting to see the suffrage movement’s ultimate achievement: passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, effective in 1920.
My published books:
BACK TO HOME PAGE
