Arabella Babb Mansfield: America’s First Woman Lawyer By Craig Collins
T
he 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
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National Conference of Women’s Bar Associations
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.
