Trailblazers

Sanctuary is celebrating Arabella "Belle" Babb Mansfield as part of our "Embracing Change" issue. As a woman of many talents, she embraced change many times in her life. After tackling the Iowa bar exam and becoming the first, certified woman attorney in the U.S., she had a fulfilling career as an educator and, ultimately, leader in the women's suffrage movement.

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Arabella "Belle" Babb Mansfield 
​(1846-1911)
Photo: Iowa Department of Human Rights

​Arabella "Belle" Babb Mansfield was born on August 23, 1846, in Des Moines County, Iowa. Her family moved to Mount Pleasant, Iowa, in 1860 when her father died. She graduated from Iowa Wesleyan College in 1866.

Belle studied law for two years at her brother's law office. At the time, Iowa law limited admittance to the bar to white males over the age of 21, but Belle was allowed to take the exam in 1869 and passed the rigorous bar examination, administered by the all-male members of the Henry County Bar Association, with high marks. She became the first, certified woman attorney in the United States. As a result, Iowa state law was changed to allow women to practice law. However, Belle did not practice law; instead, she had a long career in education, teaching at Iowa Wesleyan College and other esteemed institutions.

She is known as having helped to organize the Iowa Woman Suffrage Society. In 1879, she and her husband, John M. Mansfield, joined the faculty of Indiana Asbury University (later DePauw University).

Belle also became one of the first, female college administrators in the United States, serving as DePauw University's Dean of the School of Art in 1893 and Dean of the School of Music in 1894. She also joined the National League of Women Lawyers in 1893, leading the way for others in the law profession.

Arabella Mansfield died on August 1, 1911, in Aurora, Illinois, at age 65, nine years before women obtained the right to vote.

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Some interesting facts...

• She was valedictorian of Iowa Wesleyan College (name changed to Iowa Wesleyan University in 2015).
• She taught political science, English, and history at Simpson College in Indianola, Iowa.
• She married John M. Mansfield in 1868, her childhood sweetheart, a professor of natural history at Iowa Wesleyan.
• In 1868, she taught at Iowa Wesleyan as a teacher of English and history.
• She also received an M.A. (1870) and an LL.B. (1872) from Iowa Wesleyan.
• Both she and her husband applied for admission to the Iowa bar in 1869. The sympathetic examiners, saying that her examination gave “the very best rebuke possible to the imputation that ladies cannot qualify for the practice of law,” certified Mansfield as the first female lawyer in the country.
• In June 1870, Belle was the temporary chair and permanent secretary of the first Iowa Women's Rights Convention, which was held in Mount Pleasant.
  
• Her husband suffered a nervous breakdown in 1884. She cared for him for two years, but she ultimately had to commit him to an "asylum."
•  She and her husband had no children. On retirement, she moved to the home of her brother, Washington, in Aurora, Illinois, where she died within months of her retirement. She was buried in the Forest Home Cemetery in Mount Pleasant, Iowa.
• In 1980, Arabella Mansfield was inducted into the Iowa Women's Hall of Fame.
• In 2002, the Iowa Organization of Women Attorneys established the Arabella Mansfield Award to recognize outstanding women lawyers in the state.

Statue at Iowa Wesleyan College by Benjamin Victor
Photo: Historical Marker Database at Iowa Wesleyan University

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