Marilynne Graboys Wool must have spent some lonely days in the wilderness of the legal profession in the 1950s. One of only three women in her Fordham Law class to graduate, only the eighth woman admitted to the Rhode Island Bar in 1950, among the few in Connecticut in 1956, she clearly blazed some paths for her gender.

Thus it was no surprise when she died last year at age 72 that her brother George Graboys, as executor of her estate, established an endowment in her name to send low-income Rhode Island women to law school.

Mrs. Wool felt her career in the law was pre-ordained. “I was steeped in it,” she told a reporter in 1967, “my father and brother are lawyers.” Add to that her late husband, Louis C. Wool, who also became a judge.

“It’s good training. Lawyers think logically. And women can bring understanding and intuition to the profession,” she observed at the time. “If a girl gets through law school, she can get a job. But the competition is keen — she has to be exceptional and find her niche. And work twice as hard to get half the recognition a man gets.”

Those difficulties may have lessened for her in the next three decades, but there’s little doubt she worked hard. In addition to a considerable practice in commercial law — corporate work, estate planning, secured transatctions — she raised two children (Abby Wool Landon, now in Oregon, and Jon Wool of Chicago). She was listed several years in the Who’s Who of American Women.

“I never wanted to be a stereotype professional woman — marriage is the most important thing, I feel, but it can’t be a woman’s whole life.”
And now one legacy of her life will be that others can follow her.