Lena Madesin Phillips was an American lawyer and clubwoman.
Background
She was born Anna Lena Phillips on October 15, 1881 in Nicholasville, Kentucky, United States. The daughter of County Judge William Henry Phillips and Alice Shook Phillips, she adopted the name Lena Madesin (a corruption of the French médecin) at the age of eleven, while a favorite brother was studying medicine in France.
Education
She graduated from the Jessamine Female Institute in Nicholasville and entered the Woman's College of Baltimore (later Goucher) in 1899. After two years of college, Phillips began to prepare for a career as a concert pianist at the Peabody Institute of Music in Baltimore.
She entered the University of Kentucky Law School in 1915 and received the LL. B. , with honors, in 1917. In 1923 she received the LL. M. from New York University.
Career
After her first public performance, she injured a nerve in her arm. In 1903 she returned home to recuperate. For more than a decade Phillips sought a fulfilling profession.
She was a clerk, and then a door-to-door bookseller in Nicholasville, and in 1904 she took charge of the music department at the Jessamine Institute. Dissatisfied with teaching, in 1906 she tried unsuccessfully to sell her popular songs in New York City. From her mother's death in 1908 until her own nervous collapse in 1915, Phillips kept house for her father and taught music, operating her own academy for five years.
It was after treatment in a sanatorium that Phillips, at the age of thirty-four, decided to become a lawyer. Phillips had practiced law briefly in Nicholasville when the Young Women's Christian Association requested her aid on its National War Work Council. She served as an officer of the Kentucky Campaign Committee.
She was invited to New York to take charge of organizing business and professional women for war work. Although the war had ended by the time that the National Business Women's Committee met in 1918, the members determined to create a peacetime organization to further the interests of professional women. Supported by YWCA funds, Phillips arranged a convention in St. Louis in July 1919, at which the National Federation of Business and Professional Women's Clubs was created. From 1919 until 1923 she served as its salaried executive secretary.
Phillips spent much of her time traveling around the country, establishing clubs in small towns and cities. Like many middle-class and professional women, Phillips and most federation members favored passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, preferring the end of discrimination against women to special legislation protecting their interests.
Phillips returned to the study of law in 1923. She began practicing in New York City, where she lived with Marjory Lacey-Baker, a friend from her YWCA days who became her lifelong companion. She served as president of the National Council of Women from 1931 to 1935 and presided over the International Conference of Women at the Chicago World's Fair in 1933.
Phillips gave up her legal practice in 1935 and became an associate editor of Pictorial Review, for which she wrote a monthly clubwomen's column until the magazine's demise in 1939. As president of the National Federation of Business and Professional Women's Clubs from 1926 to 1929, Phillips conceived the idea of establishing an international organization of professional women. Through the federation's international relations committee, she organized several goodwill tours to Europe that culminated in a conference in August 1930 in Geneva at which the International Federation of Business and Professional Women was founded. Phillips was its president from 1930 to 1947, and on numerous trips to Europe during this period she fostered new federations, tried to maintain contact between professional women during wartime, and aided women's war relief work both at home and abroad.
After World War II she was a consultant to the United Nations Economic and Social Council and was chairwoman of the First International Conference on Public Information. Phillips' two ventures into politics were unsuccessful: as Democratic candidate for the Connecticut state legislature in 1942 and as Progressive party candidate for lieutenant governor of Connecticut in 1948. She resigned the presidency of the International Federation in 1947 but remained an active member of both organizations.
She died in Marseilles, France, during a trip to study the status of women in the Middle East.
Views
According to Phillips, professional women needed to promote each other's interests in order to counteract discrimination against their entry into, and advancement within, male-dominated occupations. The federation's task was to organize women in white-collar jobs into local clubs, inform them of the opportunities and obstacles they might encounter, and take public stands on legislation that affected them.
Quotations:
She was quoted saying, " . .. if our motive is right, if we have faith, vision and courage, accomplishment must come. "