Chairs the Iowa Women's Suffrage Convention

In 1870, building on her newfound prominence as the first woman admitted to the American legal profession, Arabella Mansfield took on a leading public role by chairing the Iowa Women's Suffrage Convention. Her legal credentials lent significant authority and legitimacy to the suffrage cause, as she could speak not only as an advocate for women's rights but as living proof that women could excel in fields long reserved for men.

As chair of the convention, Mansfield helped organize and direct the discussions and resolutions of Iowa suffragists who were pressing for women's right to vote at a time when the broader national suffrage movement was still in its early, fragmented stages — more than fifty years before the Nineteenth Amendment would be ratified in 1920.

Her involvement in the suffrage movement was not a departure from her legal work but a natural extension of it: both endeavors were fundamentally about expanding the boundaries of what women were permitted to do in American public life. Mansfield used her platform to argue that if women could master the law, pass rigorous examinations, and be admitted alongside men, they were equally capable of exercising the full rights of citizenship, including the vote.

Her leadership in this convention cemented her legacy as not merely a legal pioneer but also a committed activist for women's broader civil and political rights, work she would continue for decades afterward through lectures and organizational involvement.