Barbara Oaks Silver, award-winning attorney, empowering teacher, and women’s advocate, has died at 87

Barbara Oaks Silver, 87, of Philadelphia, award-winning attorney, empowering teacher, passionate women’s advocate, and devoted wife and mother, died Sunday, Aug. 21, of Parkinson’s disease at her home on Rittenhouse Square.

Described by a colleague as “tenacious, life-loving, and fearless,” Ms. Silver formed the Philadelphia law firm Silver & Silver with her second husband, Edward W. Silver, in 1974 and simultaneously empowered women through education and nurtured her family with devotion.

Silver & Silver specialized in family law, estates, and financial planning for 17 years, and Ms. Silver concurrently taught previously unavailable introductory classes in law and finance to thousands of women and others. Yet, despite her hectic schedule, she never scrimped on family time.

“The care that others received [from her], her husband, child, and family received many times over,” said her son Rob Oaks. “I really felt like I came first.” A colleague said: “She made everyone in her circle feel important, appreciated, loved, and understood. And there was never any pretense.”

In 1991, Ms. Silver and her husband joined Astor Weiss Kaplan & Mandel. She earned repeated recognition as a top attorney by publications and colleagues and was active with the firm until just weeks before her death. Her husband died in 2018.

“A light has gone out in the firm,” a colleague said in a tribute.

A pioneer in the advancement of female attorneys in Philadelphia, Ms. Silver, beginning in 1978, taught corporate law at Philadelphia’s Institute for Paralegal Training and other classes, mainly for women, for more than a dozen years. She called her sessions “The Law, The Community and You” and “Practical Law and Money,” and held them at Temple University’s Center City campus, the Gershman Y on South Broad Street, and Philadelphia’s Institute of Awareness.

“She had a passion to teach women and was extremely effective,” said Phyllis Beck, a retired judge on the Superior Court of Pennsylvania and Ms. Silver’s schoolmate at Temple Law School’s evening division. “She was unique and had a wonderful sense of compassion for people.”

Ms. Silver’s son said: “She saw an opportunity to make a difference, that many women did not have financial awareness. She saw a breach, and she stepped into it.”

Born Sept. 17, 1934, in Philadelphia, Barbara Berger graduated from Olney High School in 1952, received an academic scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania, and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in music in 1956.

She taught piano lessons for several years but, seeking to have a greater impact on people’s everyday lives and especially motivated by women’s issues, attended night classes at Temple Law School, now Beasley School of Law, in 1965 and graduated first in her class in 1969. “She had a wonderful mind and wanted to paint on a larger canvas,” said Beck, with whom Ms. Silver had consulted about becoming an attorney.

She married Martin Oaks in 1955, and they had son Rob in 1959. They divorced later, and Martin Oaks died in 2003. She married Silver in 1967.

Friendly and humorous — she was known for her practical jokes — Ms. Silver lectured frequently in Pennsylvania and New Jersey on family law and estate planning. She was a sophisticated attorney and skilled negotiator, often leaving both wife and husband satisfied after divorce proceedings. “Everybody loved her and loved being in her company,” Beck said.

“She found fun and joy in the practice of divorce law,” a colleague said. “Who else could do that?”

Ms. Silver played piano, enjoyed classical music, and was chair of the board of Friends of Curtis Institute of Music and a member of the Leopold Stokowski Society’s executive board. She was also a board member of the LiveWell Foundation, a nonprofit supporting people with depression.

She liked to play bridge, finish off crossword puzzles, and devour detective novels. Her optimism and energy were contagious, and a friend described her as a “whirling dervish, a multiarmed Siva reaching out in all directions to capture whatever joy, pleasure, or experience may have eluded her insatiable grasp.”

Her son said: “Barbara lived an extraordinary life of joy and giving. She touched the lives of others in profound and abundant ways.”

In addition to her son, Ms. Silver is survived by two grandsons, two great-granddaughters, and other relatives.

A celebration of her life is to be held later.

Donations in her name may be made to the LiveWell Foundation, 250 S. 17th St., No. 1400, Philadelphia, Pa. 19103.