Born on May 23, 1846, on the family farm near Sperry Station, Iowa, Belle Aurelia Babb grew up and attended school there and, from 1860, in Mount Pleasant, Iowa. She graduated from Iowa Wesleyan University in 1866. (By that time she was known as Arabella.) She then taught at Simpson College in Indianola until her marriage in June 1868 to John M. Mansfield, a professor at Iowa Wesleyan. She joined the Iowa Wesleyan faculty in that year as a teacher of English and history. With her husband she studied law as well, and together they applied for admission to the Iowa bar in June 1869. The judge who passed on their application proved sympathetic to the idea of equal rights and protection for women, and, on learning from the equally sympathetic examiners that Mansfield had passed her examination with high honors, he construed the words ╥man╙ and ╥male╙ in the state law regulating bar admissions as extending to women as well and approved her application.
Mansfield thus became the first woman to be admitted to the bar in the United States. She did not practice law, however, but continued to., teach at Iowa Wesleyan, from which she also received M.A. and LL.B. degrees in 1870 and 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, which five years later became 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, she 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, also as dean of the school of music from 1894, and from time to time in other administrative capacities. She died in Aurora, Illinois, on August 2, 1911.
