Arabella Mansfield  Arabella Mansfield (May 23, 1846 – August 1, 1911), born Belle Aurelia Babb, became the first female 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. 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). 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, a young professor at Iowa Wesleyan. He encouraged her in her ambition to study law.