Education: A Male

An unsolicited, embarrassing bequest came with the New Year to Columbia, Princeton, Harvard and Yale, when the will of the late Albert Enoch Pillsbury, onetime Attorney General of Massachusetts, who died last month at the age of 81, was made public. Said the will: "Believing that the modern feminist movement tends to take woman out of the home and put her in politics, government or business, and that this has already begun to impair the family as a basis of civilization and its advance, I bequeath to Harvard. Yale, Princeton and Columbia colleges $25,000 each . . . [to be used] toward creating or developing sound public opinion and action on this subject."

Keen-minded, acidic, Albert Enoch Pillsbury was long known as one of Boston's ablest legal minds. He had entered Harvard in 1867 (among his classmates were Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Bishop William Lawrence, Charles Joseph Bonaparte). Unwary hazers remembered his stocky, undaunted figure: once he beat them off with upraised chair in one hand, menacing clasp-knife in the other. Two years later he was expelled for his pranks, went to Boston and passed his bar examination. The Harvard faculty invited him back. "Go to hell!" was his booming défi. He grew a long black beard, practised law. At 36 he was president of the Massachusetts Senate. He became Attorney General in 1891, and in that year accepted Harvard's honorary A.M. degree "as of 1871."

Never publicly but often privately did Mr. Pillsbury inveigh against feminism and salute the ideal oldtime mother who kept her place in the home. Every one knew that his interests were World Peace, prevention of cruelty to animals, New Hampshire forestry. He played the violin. But everyone did not know that he had married twice (Louise Wheeler in 1889. Elizabeth Mooney in 1905), that he had quietly divorced his first wife, had been divorced in Reno by his second. But his disapproval of women in public did not lessen his esteem for their personal capacities.