Resources

The following resources are annotated to indicate content and quality that may be of interest to you as you write your own values, stories, histories, memoirs, spiritual journeys, legacies. Some are books about ethical wills, others are about writing, and others are memoirs or fiction about the lives of women. Titles that are links may be purchased directly from Amazon.com with a click of your mouse.

If you have read something that you think would enrich this resource list, please email the data with a short paragraph describing its value and how it fits the focus of women's legacies. email info@womenslegacies.com

Baines, Barry K
Ethical Wills:Putting Your Values on Paper - Provides basic information for creating an ethical will with examples from different age groups. Helps create a will in a short amount of time. Visit ethicalwill.com for current Ethical Will information.

Berkeley, Ellen Perry, editor
At Grandmother's Table: Women Write about Food, Life, and the Enduring Bond Between Grandmothers and Granddaughters - Recipes interspersed with stories, pictures and poems about the generation to generation bond.

Bolen, Jean Shinoda
The Millionth Circle: How to Change Ourselves and The World - A discussion of the power of women's circles to accelerate humanity's shift to a post-patriarchal era. Bolen believes that a women's circle "is an archetypal form that feels familiar to the psyches of most women. It's personal and egalitarian....enhances collaborative undertakings. . ."

Edelman, Marian Wright
The Measure of Our Success: A Letter to my Children and Yours - A small, powerful book which is a spiritual-ethical will for Marian's sons. It focuses on family legacy, passing on the Legacy of Service, a Letter to her Sons, and 25 Lessons for Life

Eve, Nomi
The Family Orchard - A marvelous adventure into the past. It's about 6 generations of a Jewish family emigrating from Eastern Europe to Palestine to America. Beautifully written, using the counterpoint of her father's "factual account" and her imaginative and sensual "story" a fictional family legacy from a woman's perspective.

Freed, Rachael A.
The Heartmates Journal: A Companion for Partners of People with Serious Willness - A guided, yearlong, interactive journal to record the concerns, issues and feelings that a heartmate experiences moving toward recovery through the losses and grief inherent in coming to a new normal after a cardiac diagnosis . . . . lifestyle and emotional needs, physical and spiritual concerns, needs for privacy, support and community are addressed -- Topics may be helpful for women struggling to deal with chronic illness in their family. And, Heartmates: A Guide for the Spouse and Family of the Heart Patient, a self-help book for women dealing with chronic and life-threatening illness.

Fremont, Helen
After Long Silence - A young woman searches her parents' and aunt's history to understand her own identity . . . breaking through the secrets of pain in a Jewish/Polish family that survived the Holocaust by their wits and skills, and by converting to Catholicism; and in the process losing their identity, their ability to connect, even their names. A fascinating read and a powerful example of the demanding yearning for roots to receive the legacy of family and experience wholeness.

The Memoirs of Gluckel of Hameln - Translated by Marvin Lowenthal. The only extant pre-modern spiritual-ethical will written by a woman from 1690. She reported that she wrote to "keep herself sane" and to provide her children a history so they "would know from what sort of people they had sprung" and would be able to pass that history on to their children and grandchildren. She wrote of everyday concerns, homely subjects and was perhaps a pioneer for the impressionists painting 200 years later. An interesting comparison with the post-modern Everything I Know, by Sharon Strassfeld (see below).

Reimer, Jack & Nathaniel Stampfer (editors and annotators). So that Your Values Live On - Ethical Wills and How to Prepare Them -A collection of traditional wills, wills from the Holocaust, Israel, of modern and contemporary Jews, and from modern Jewish literature, 50+ are men's wills, about a dozen are women's. Concludes with a six page guide to writing an ethical will, with suggestions for topics to be covered, and a brief considerations about conveying the document. Moderately useful, but a quick scan at the library is probably enough!

Remen, Rachel Naomi, MD
Kitchen Table Wisdom - A collection of "inspiring, moving, important" stories told by Remen of cancer patients she has worked with, focusing on qualities of love and loneliness, healing, loss and freedom, intimacy and forgiveness. In her introduction she writes at length of the power of story telling to connect us and our unique stories to the human story "weav[ing] us together as a family" and as a human community. And her most recent, My Grandfather's Blessings, is more of the same, a sequel that works.

Strassfeld, Sharon
Everything I Know, Basic Life Rules from a Jewish Mother - Co-author of The Jewish Catalogs Strassfeld writes to her daughter whom she has launched. The book is a combination of stories expressing the values she and her family and Jewish community have, direct instruction in basic rules and values to live by, and straight communication accepting her own personality, expressing her love, naming and appreciating her daughter's gifts and limitations as she sees them, and apologies for pain she caused her. A small book, but a book long spiritual-ethical will.