The Gazette 1990

GAZETTE

SEPTEMBER 1990

Other states were not slow to follow Iowa. A lady named Lemma Barkaloo was admitted in Missouri in 1870, followed by eleven more states in the eighteen-seventies and nine in the eighteen-eighties. Alaska brought up the rear, Mildred Herman having been admitted there in 1950. By 1893 there were enough women lawyers in the States to hold aCongress in Chicago, during the World's Fair. Some controversy had arisen over the claim of Arabella Mansfield to be the first woman lawyer in the whole of the United States, and the Congress appointed a committee to investi- gate the dispute. The committee duly awarded the title to Mrs. Mansfield but noted that' a lady named Ada Kepley had been the first woman in the States to be graduated from a law school when she earned her degree in 1870 from Union College in Chicago. Mrs. Mansfield, as we saw, had not attended a law school when she was studying law. Mrs. Mansfield had been born Arabella Babb. She had met a

friendlier reception from the law then her near namesake MissBebb, the lady from Oxford who had been rebuffed by the Court of Appeal. An article about Mrs. Mansfield in The lowan Magazine of Summer 1967 notes that the judge who presided over the official proceedings admitting Mrs. Mansfield to practise had interpreted the statue reading "any white male person" and another section which allowed "words importing the masculine gender only" to be extended to females quite liberally for his generation. As a fitting coda to this account of feminine achievement, one might quote from a report on the legal profesion in The Times of 13 March 1990 according to which "approximately one-third of those called to the Bar, and over half of admitted solicitors, are women". • *Editor's Note: Later QC and for many years a distinguished editor of the Scots Law Times. * Henry G. Button lives in Cambridge, England, where he is Secretary of The Old Members' Club of his College. He is an author, a great letter writer and a part-time tour guide.

called to the Bar at the Inner Temple, in November 1922. In England the first woman to take silk was (Dame) Rose Heilbron in 1940 and in Scotland (Dame) Margaret Kidd in 1948*. In Northern Ireland no woman took silk until 1989 (Miss Eilish McDermott). Finally, let us pay tribute to the pioneering women lawyers in the United States. A learned friend in Philadelphia has kindly supplied me with a list of the first women lawyers in each of the individual states. Iowa, perhaps surprisingly, led the way. Mrs. Arabella Mansfield, who had been born on May 23, 1846, had begun her study of the law by "reading" in a law office in Mt. Pleasant, Iowa. In June 1869 she was admitted to the Iowa State bar. In 1881 she moved to DePaul University in Indiana, where her husband had been appointed Professor of Chemistry. Until her death in 1911 she served there in various capacities, as Dean of Women and Professor of History. Mansfield Hall in the university is named after her.

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