Page:The part taken by women in American history.djvu/790

Rh sale and manufacture of alcoholic liquors. Maintaining as she did that no organization has the right to prejudice the rights of its members to any other organization for any purpose, these views led her to affiliate with the non-partisan league, and she served that body for several years as corresponding secretary, having her office in Boston, Massachusetts. In 1887 she visited Europe, where she rested and studied the temperance question. After her return from England, she moved to Washington City and rapidly became prominent in public affairs. She was sent by Secretary Hay, with Clara Barton, as a delegate to the International Congress of the Red Cross. She was an official member of the Taft party to the Philippines, and then went on to other lands to visit branches of the Foreign Missions of the Methodist Church. Her last appointment was to investigate the conditions of women and children workers, and the condition of the Federal prisons. She succeeded in causing a special wing lor women to be established in the Leavenworth penitentiary. She continued her activities in the cause of humanity until the day of her death, August II, 1910.

Mrs. Bell A. Mansfield was the first woman admitted to the practice of law in the United States. She was admitted to the bar in 1868 in the state of Iowa. Her death occurred August 1, 1911, at the home of her brother, Judge W. J. Babb, of Aurora, Illinois. She was in her sixty-fifth year at the time of her death.

Born at Geneva, Ohio, in 1850. Was the daughter of Piatt R. Spencer, (the author of the Spencerian system of writing,) and Persis Duty Spencer. She read law in the office of her husband, General Mussey, whom she married June 14, 1871. She established the Washington College of Law for Women in 1899. In 1893 she was first admitted to the bar and practiced law even before her husband's death. Was counsel for some of the foreign legations, and several national, patriotic, and labor organizations. She secured the passage of the bill through Congress giving mothers in the District of Columbia the same right to their children as their fathers and giving married women the right to do business and to control their own earnings, and also an appropriation for the first public kindergarten in the District of Columbia. She was one of the founders of the National Red Cross, a member of the Legion of Loyal Women, ex-vice-president-general Daughters of the American Revolution, and is now a member of the Board of Education of Washington, District of Columbia. Looking back over the field of art for the past five centuries, one cannot fail to be impressed by the exceeding scarcity