Mansfield, Arabella

▪ American educator

née  Belle Aurelia Babb 

born May 23, 1846, near Burlington, Iowa, U.S.

died Aug. 2, 1911, Aurora, Ill.

      American educator who was the first woman admitted to the legal profession in the United States.

      Belle Babb graduated from Iowa Wesleyan University in 1866 (by which time she was known as Arabella). She then taught political science, English, and history at Simpson College in Indianola, Iowa, until her marriage in 1868 to John M. Mansfield, a professor of natural history at Iowa Wesleyan. She joined the Iowa Wesleyan faculty that year as a teacher of English and history. With her husband, Mansfield studied law, and together they 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.

      Mansfield did not practice law, however, but continued to teach at Iowa Wesleyan, from which she also received an M.A. (1870) and an LL.B. (1872). During that time she helped organize the Iowa Woman Suffrage Society. In 1879 she and her husband joined the faculty of Indiana Asbury University (later DePauw University). After a two-year period devoted to caring for her husband, who had suffered a nervous breakdown and whom she ultimately was obliged to place in an asylum, Mansfield resumed her career at DePauw in 1886. She remained there until her death, teaching at various times history, aesthetics, and music history and serving as dean of the school of art from 1893 and dean of the school of music from 1894.

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