Saturday, May 23 was the birthday of Arabella Mansfield (1846-1911), who, in 1869, became the first female attorney in the United States.

Via National Women’s History Museum / Facebook

Via the National Women’s History Museum on Facebook:

In 1869 she became the first female lawyer in the United States. Mansfield passed the bar despite the fact that the test was only supposed to be administered to men at that time. She challenged the legality of the restriction in Iowa and won her appeal, making Iowa the first state to admit women to its bar.

(h/t Georgette)

From the Iowa Organization of Women Attorneys:

Arabella Mansfield, also commonly known as Belle Babb Mansfield, was the first woman lawyer admitted to the practice of law in the United States. Ms. Mansfield studied law in her brother’s law office for two years and was admitted to the Iowa Bar in 1869. She was admitted despite the fact that Iowa law required an applicant for bar admission be white, male, and over the age of 21. Arabella and her husband taught at Iowa Wesleyan College, then moved to Greencastle, Indiana in 1876, to teach at DePauw University. She served as Dean of the School of Art in 1893, and Dean of the School of Music in 1894. She was also active in the women’s suffrage movement, chairing the Iowa Women’s Suffrage Convention in 1870, but died in 1911, nine years before women obtained the right to vote. She was inducted into the Iowa Women’s Hall of Fame in 1980.

I checked Google Scholar to see if her appeal was included there. I didn’t find it, but I found two other interesting cases:

• Arabella Mansfield did not settle the issue of whether women could become attorneys in every state. Three years later, the U.S. Supreme Court denied the appeal of a woman who had been denied admission to the Illinois Bar on account of her gender. Here are a few gems from a concurring opinion:
  

  The claim of the plaintiff, who is a married woman, to be admitted to practice as an attorney and counsellor-at-law, is based upon the supposed right of every person, man or woman, to engage in any lawful employment for a livelihood. The Supreme Court of Illinois denied the application on the ground that, by the common law, which is the basis of the laws of Illinois, only men were admitted to the bar, and the legislature had not made any change in this respect, but had simply provided that no person should be admitted to practice as attorney or counsellor without having previously obtained a license for that purpose from two justices of the Supreme Court, and that no person should receive a license without first obtaining a certificate from the court of some county of his good moral character. In other respects it was left to the discretion of the court to establish the rules by which admission to the profession should be determined.

  ***

  The claim that, under the fourteenth amendment of the Constitution, which declares that no State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States, the statute law of Illinois, or the common law prevailing in that State, can no longer be set up as a barrier against the right of females to pursue any lawful employment for a livelihood (the practice of law included), assumes that it is one of the privileges and immunities of women as citizens to engage in any and every profession, occupation, or employment in civil life.

  It certainly cannot be affirmed, as an historical fact, that this has ever been established as one of the fundamental privileges and immunities of the sex. On the contrary, the civil law, as well as nature herself, has always recognized a wide difference in the respective spheres and destinies of man and woman. Man is, or should be, woman’s protector and defender. The natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life. The constitution of the family organization, which is founded in the divine ordinance, as well as in the nature of things, indicates the domestic sphere as that which properly belongs to the domain and functions of womanhood.

  ***

  It is true that many women are unmarried and not affected by any of the duties, complications, and incapacities arising out of the married state, but these are exceptions to the general rule. The paramount destiny and mission of woman are to fulfil the noble and benign offices of wife and mother. This is the law of the Creator. And the rules of civil society must be adapted to the general constitution of things, and cannot be based upon exceptional cases.

  Bradwell v. The State, 83. U.S. 130, 140-41 (1872) (J. Bradley, concurring) [Emphasis added].

  I’ll just let y’all sit with that for a bit.

• More recently (and much more progressively), Arabella Mansfield’s name came up in an Iowa Supreme Court decision finding that the state must include the “nonbirthing spouse in a lesbian marriage” on a child’s birth certificate:
  

  When the statute refers to only one gender and the gender referenced is masculine, section 4.1(17) extends the statute to include females. The Henry County District Court observed this legal truth in an early decision concerning whether it should admit Arabella Mansfield to the Iowa bar. At that time, the Iowa statute regulating the bar admission of attorneys referred to only “white male person[s].” Iowa Code § 2700 (1860). The court relied on a prior version of section 4.1(17) and found “not only by the language of the law itself, but by the demands and necessities of the present time and occasion,” that masculine terms include feminine words. Mary L. Clark, The Founding of the Washington College of Law: The First Law School Established by Women for Women, 47 Am. U.L.Rev. 613, 622 n. 45 (1998). As a result, Mansfield became the first woman to secure a state law license in the United States.

  Gartner v. Iowa Dept. of Public Health, 830 N.W.2d 335, 349 (Iowa 2013) (footnotes omitted).

The Iowa Judicial Branch website has some information about Mansfield’s court case, and the University of Iowa has more information about her.

In 2001, women accounted for 49.4% of first-year law school enrollments, the highest rate up to that point or since. The decline since then may have more to do with the economy than anything else, but it’s hard to say. It’s not quite parity, but it’s dang close. (Some law schools, especially smaller ones, are seeing parity, or even the number of women exceeding the number of men in 1L classes.)

My point being that Arabella Mansfield blazed the trail for a 132-year process to achieve something women never should have had to fight for in the first place. A hearty bravo to the women, and a WTF? to the (mostly) dudes who stood in their way all that time (lookin’ at you, Justice Joseph P. Bradley…..)

See also: The California Supreme Court’s posthumous admission to the state bar of Hong Yen Chang, 125 years after his rejection on the grounds that Chinese people were ineligible to become attorneys in the state.