Arabella Babb Mansfield: America's First Woman Lawyer

By Craig Collins

The phrase is used so often today it’s lost most of its meaning; people who hear or read the words “she was ahead of her time” rarely stop to think about what they mean. But the case of Arabella Babb Mansfield is worth more than a moment’s notice. When she passed the Iowa bar on June 15, 1869, she earned the right to argue laws in court a full 50 years and one month before ratification of the 19th Amendment guaranteed American women the right to vote.

An unusual convergence of circumstances laid the groundwork for her achievement. She was born Belle Aurelia Babb on May 23, 1846, on her family farm near Burlington, Iowa, to parents Miles Babb and Mary Moyer. In 1850, Miles was swept up in the California gold rush, and secured a position as a superintendent of a mining company in the Sierra Nevada foothills. He was killed in a mine tunnel cave-in on Dec. 21, 1852.

The Babbs were a close family, and the news was devastating, but Miles had made provisions in his will for the education of Belle and her older brother, Washington Irving (W.I.). Mary purchased scholarships to hold places for each of her children at Iowa Wesleyan University in Mount Pleasant, about 30 miles northwest of Burlington, and all three of them moved there together in 1860, when W.I. reached college age.

By then, Mount Pleasant, a town of more than 3,500 people, had become the cultural and intellectual hub of Iowa’s progressive southeastern corner, and its reputation for educational excellence had earned it an honorific nickname: the “Athens of Iowa.” It was home to learned, cultured citizens who tended to be progressive on the issues of the day, particularly slavery and women’s rights – but its progressivism was firmly rooted in the countercultural traditions of the Methodist Episcopal Church, whose congregants had founded Iowa Wesleyan, Iowa’s first fouryear college, in 1841. By the 1850s, the school was one of just a few nationwide to admit women students.

Sometime around her enrollment at Iowa Wesleyan in the fall of 1862, Belle, perhaps deciding she didn’t like the sound of “Belle Babb,” began calling herself Arabella. Her enrollment, more than a year after the start of the Civil War, coincided with a lull in activity on campus; much of the university’s funding was being redirected to soldier relief efforts, and many of the students were off fighting the war – including W.I., who served in the 8th Iowa Cavalry from 1863 to 1865 and returned to school in time to graduate in the same class as his sister.

At Iowa Wesleyan, Arabella met many of the friends and acquaintances who would become her inner social circle – including her future husband, John Mansfield, who was a junior when Arabella was a freshman and who joined the Iowa Wesleyan faculty in the fall of 1864 as a professor of chemistry and natural history. It’s not clear when the two became romantically attached, but given the small size of the campus community at the time, they surely knew each other when they were at the university together.

By the time she’d become a university student, then, the external factors of Arabella Mansfield’s life – a close, loving family that prioritized education; a religious tradition of advocating for social justice; and a progressive community – had put her in a position to do what no woman had done before.

The most important factor in any personal achievement, of course, is the person herself – but it’s difficult to determine the reasons behind some of Arabella Mansfield’s choices, despite the fact that she was a public figure. Historians have been forced to draw inferences from the record of her life. She was obviously intelligent; she was valedictorian of her graduating class (her brother was the salutatorian), but because the text of her valedictory address, titled “The Two Temples,” has been lost to history, nobody knows what she had to say on the occasion. After graduation, she moved to Indianola, Iowa, a town just south of Des Moines, to join the faculty of a Methodist college.

It’s also unclear why Arabella left Indianola a year later to return to Mount Pleasant, at the age of 21, and embark on a full-time study of law at the office of H. & R. Ambler, where W.I. was studying and about to pass the bar (he would later join the firm, which would become Ambler & Babb). An attachment to John Mansfield may have had something to do with it: John, too, began studying law at the Ambler offices, and the two of them were married on June 23, 1868.

When Arabella Mansfield stood before the bar examiners at the Mount Pleasant courthouse on June 15, 1869, John was by her side. Both would be examined and admitted to the bar on the same day. The examining committee was fully aware of the history being made that day, as they stated:

Your Committee take unusual pleasure in recommending the admission of Mrs. Mansfield, not only because she is the first lady that has thus applied for this authority, in the State, but because, in her examination, she has given the very best rebuke possible to the imputation that ladies cannot qualify themselves for the practice of law. In order to make way for Arabella’s admission, the District Court judge, Francis Springer, generously interpreted the Iowa code, which restricted the practice of law in the state to qualifying “white males.” But Springer had also unearthed a line in the state’s general construction statute that read: “words importing the masculine gender only may be extended to females.” Springer interpreted this to mean the code did not exclude women from the practice of law. It was a remarkably easy victory for Arabella Mansfield; many aspiring women lawyers, in states with similarly written codes, had been denied and would continue to battle to join the legal profession.

Beyond the Mount Pleasant Journal, which noted the accomplishment with the headline “The Athens of Iowa Ahead: A Lady Admitted to Practice Law,” only a handful of publications took notice of the occasion, which might have had a more obvious impact if Mansfield had chosen to practice law. Why she didn’t is another mystery – but circumstances suggest she had turned her attention to another challenge: winning the right for women to vote.

The suffrage movement, in fact, may have had something to do with Arabella’s decision to return to Mount Pleasant in the fall of 1867, when the issue was heating up. National leaders such as Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Lucy Stone had always considered the rights of women and African-Americans to be bound together in an endeavor to realize the Constitution’s promise of a government of, by, and for the people. But this bond was weakening; opponents of suffrage for both women and African-Americans had shrewdly deployed the divideand-conquer strategy.

In 1867, for example, two referenda were placed before voters in the Kansas territory: one that would extend voting rights to black men, and one that would extend suffrage to women. Knowing public sentiment was more aligned with African-American suffrage than woman suffrage, opponents of both claimed it would be appalling for (white, male) voters to raise uneducated former slaves to a status above their own mothers, wives, and sisters. Arguments ensued, both Kansas measures failed, and radical Republicans in Congress dropped the issue of woman suffrage, proposing a 15th Amendment to the Constitution that forbid denial of the right to vote “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude” – but not sex.

Women who’d fought so long for abolition and voting rights felt betrayed, and the movement splintered into two competing factions. The radicals, led by Anthony and Stanton, vowed to oppose the 15th Amendment if it excluded women. The moderates, led by Stone, acknowledged black male suffrage as a step forward and pledged their support.

All of this happened while Arabella Mansfield was studying for her bar examination, and within months of earning her law license, she threw herself behind the cause of woman suffrage. She and John were among a group of Iowans who called for a delegate convention for Stone’s faction, the American Woman Suffrage Association, and these delegates later elected Mansfield to be Iowa’s executive committee member.

In June 1870, the 24-year-old Mansfield chaired Iowa’s first statewide suffrage convention and achieved the ambitious goal of uniting Iowa’s woman suffragists, radicals and moderates alike, in forming the Iowa Woman Suffrage Association (IWSA). Afterward, Mansfield helped to establish the local auxiliary, the Henry County Woman Suffrage Association, and was elected its president.

Mansfield’s attempts at unifying the radical and moderate factions couldn’t hold. Many Iowans – and particularly the Methodists of Mount Pleasant – were upset by the increasingly scandalous public pronouncements of the Cady/Stanton faction’s new firebrand, Victoria Woodhull. The daughter of a fortune-teller and snake oil salesman, Woodhull espoused “free love,” argued for legalized prostitution, and shared the idea, sometimes suggested in the rhetoric of Stanton, that marriage was a form of “sexual slavery” – a shocking choice of words, but one derived from fact: It wasn’t until 1993, more than 120 years later, that all 50 state legislatures made it illegal for a husband to force sexual intercourse on an unwilling wife.

Both Anthony and Stanton, and later Woodhull herself, distanced themselves from some of these views – and pointed out that they had nothing to do with the issue of voting rights – but they were damaging. The IWSA was compelled to publicly assert its support of the institution of marriage. Despite the association’s valiant efforts to make peace, the fractured movement failed to mount a successful lobbying campaign, and a proposed woman suffrage amendment to the Iowa Constitution died in the Legislature in March 1872.

The failure of these efforts appears to have abruptly ended Arabella Mansfield’s lobbying career. Though she retained an intense interest in the law, she threw herself into life as an educator and administrator, joining the faculty of Iowa Wesleyan, where she’d been awarded a master’s degree in 1870 and a bachelor of laws degree in 1872. She resigned her position in 1879 to move with John to Greencastle, Indiana, where John had joined the science faculty at Indiana Asbury University (later DePauw University), and after John fell ill in 1884, she worked to support him and pay his medical expenses until his death in 1894.

At DePauw, Mansfield did some teaching but devoted much of her time and energy to administrative matters as dean of women and dean of the schools of art and music. Mansfield remained active in both university life and in Greencastle’s Methodist community, teaching Sunday school, delivering frequent lectures, and leading social and charity projects aimed at educational reform and opportunities for women. Edwin H. Hughes, DePauw’s president from 1903 to 1909, described her as “the strongest and truest woman I have ever known ... a brave, patient, effective worker.”

In serving these institutions, Mansfield no doubt had a direct effect on the welfare of many young women – but the enduring legacy of her 1869 achievement has been the encouragement it offered other aspiring women lawyers. The barrier to women hoping to practice law, once cleared, was destined to fall for women elsewhere.

In Iowa, at least, it fell quickly. In March 1870, less than a year after Mansfield’s admission to the bar, the Iowa Legislature made it the first state to expressly admit women to the bar by removing the words “white” and “male” from the state’s bar admission statute and adding the words “or she.” Within two years, several more women had joined Arabella Mansfield at the Iowa bar, and in 1873, Mary B. Hickey became the first woman graduate of the University of Iowa’s law school.

Not everyone emboldened by Mansfield’s accomplishment met with immediate success. In Illinois, Myra Bradwell, an accomplished legal scholar and publisher of the Chicago Legal News, was denied in her application to the state bar, a denial upheld in the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1873 ruling in Bradwell v. Illinois. The language used in Justice Joseph Bradley’s written concurrence is a striking reminder not only of the views many powerful men held regarding women’s ambitions, but also of how often these views had little to do with the law:

Man is, or should be, woman’s protector and defender. The natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belong to the female sex evidently unfit it for many of the occupations of civil life ... The paramount destiny and mission of women are to fulfill the noble and benign offices of wife and mother. Seventeen years passed before Bradwell finally was admitted to the Illinois bar in 1890. According to the American Bar Association, she’d become one of only about 200 women lawyers in the United States at the time.

Arabella Mansfield was aware of and enjoyed her status as one who’d opened the door for other women. At the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, the Congress of Women Lawyers recognized her as the nation’s first woman lawyer, and she addressed a group of about 30 women who wanted to hear her story. Afterward, at the age of 47, Mansfield became a charter member of the newly formed National League of Women Lawyers.

It was one of few occasions during her life that Mansfield’s achievement would be recognized. It would take decades – another century, really – for the magnitude of what she’d achieved to come into focus. Most of her honors were awarded long after her death from cancer in 1911: DePauw Women’s Hall, built in 1885, was renamed Mansfield Hall in her honor in 1918, but was destroyed by fire in 1933. In 1980, Mansfield was inducted into the Iowa Women’s Hall of Fame. In 1996, the National Association of Women Lawyers named its most prestigious award, bestowed annually to women luminaries in law, the Arabella Babb Mansfield Award; past recipients include all three sitting women justices on the U.S. Supreme Court. In 2002, the Iowa Organization of Women Attorneys established the Arabella Mansfield Award to recognize outstanding women lawyers in the state. In 2008, a statue of Belle Babb Mansfield was unveiled on the Iowa Wesleyan campus.

One of the reasons Arabella Mansfield lived so quietly and was so rarely honored for her breakthrough may simply be the grim fact that the legal profession changed very little in her lifetime, or for many years afterward. In 1960, when future U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno graduated from law school, fewer than 1 in 25 American lawyers were women. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the percentage is now nearly 4 in 10. The 400,000 women lawyers in the United States make up 38 percent of American lawyers – a sharp increase, but women remain under-represented demographically.

A strategy to introduce women and other minorities into the legal profession’s leadership ranks, hatched in 2016 by the advocacy initiative Diversity Lab and nearly 50 of the nation’s leading law firms, was called the Mansfield Rule. To date, more than 65 American law firms have adopted a pilot rollout of the Mansfield Rule, which requires firms to consider a pool of candidates for significant leadership roles that is at least 30 percent women, minority, or LGBTQ+ applicants or recruits. It’s too early to tell whether the rule has affected promotions at U.S. firms, but the first year of the pilot generated data that has awakened firm leaders to some humbling realities – for example, that the vast majority of them do not track the diversity of leadership and governance candidates, nor have written job descriptions for leadership positions.

Arabella Mansfield was, strictly speaking, a radical – but she was also a devout Methodist Episcopalian who believed in following the rules. If it turns out that a rule, named after her, introduces more women and minorities to leadership and management positions in the nation’s leading law firms, it may amount to her highest honor yet.