A Legacy of Love
Rebekah Wilson
377 pp.
We’ve forgotten many of the traditions that enabled our forebears to live a simple, pre-modern life. Our ignorance of tradition is especially painful when it comes to raising our sons and daughters. Without the support of tradition, we are uncertain about how to prepare them for a way of life that we don’t know very well and perhaps we are just beginning to live out ourselves. And so it is a good thing to revisit the traditions of yesteryear, to study and ponder them, and to revive the ones that can provide a valuable legacy for future generations.
For our daughters, we would do well to revive the tradition of the hope chest. When we train our daughters to be keepers at home, we don’t simply fill them with abstract book learning that may or may not be applied at some distant date, we need to teach them many practical and productive skills that not only prepare her for marriage but can yield immediate and tangible fruit. Some of those homemaking skills will contribute right away to the family economy. But if we are wise, we will teach those skills in a way that will also create a dowry—a collection of useful and valuable items which can not only assist a young woman in setting up housekeeping but will be the beginning of her own family legacy. A hope chest can provide the proper focus for this training, becoming not only a repository for a growing dowry but a treasure chest filled with memories of the past and hopes and dreams for the future.
If you think it would be good to center your daughter’s training on the creation of a hope chest, Rebekah Wilson’s book The Hope Chest: A Legacy of Love is a very good place to turn for ideas and inspiration on how to proceed. Beginning with a short history of dowries and hope chests, Mrs. Wilson then offers many detailed suggestions for projects that can produce valuable and memorable items for a hope chest—linens, quilts, stitchery, knitting, recipes, books, journals, letters, keepsakes, tools, baby items, furniture, and more. The writing is warm and accessible, and the book could easily be an important part of the homemaking curriculum for a young woman. We have been using it with our own daughter and find it very helpful.
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