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Who's
Who in Jessamine County - Past and Present
Lena
Madesin Phillips
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LENA
MADESIN PHILLIPS had no intention of spending her days making jellies,
crocheting baby clothes and arranging flowers, and she had no problem
finding other diversions. One theme emerges as the patchwork of
her life unfolds: "I take it that neither God nor man foreordained
or foresaw that the labor of the world was to be performed by one
sex." A born leader, she takes a path of incremental steps
that prevent her from becoming a "wife of" or "mother
of." Instead, her life work becomes the founding and developing
of the  |
| Pouring tea for brothers and sisters in 1893. |
Born Anna Lena Phillips, at the age of eleven she changed her name to Madesin, after the French word medecin, in tribute to her brother who was studying medicine in Paris. Her father was a close companion until his death at the age of 95. Her letters to him are copious, four to five per week every year of her life. He encouraged her to find her true self -- they "were of the same stuff, alike in temperament and taste." They camped and fished together, and she broke precedent by riding a bicycle to school, skirt to her ankles and pigtails flying.
"Love of nature, faith in a Supreme Being, faith in myself -- these things bestowed upon me in the little town of my birth nourished me through my life," Madesin Phillips wrote of Nicholasville, Kentucky. But she found the restrictions placed on her because she was a girl maddening. She simply wanted to be herself. Nowhere in Nicholasville "was to be found the belief that all human beings, whatever their nationality or sex, possessed the same desires and needs," she wrote. "As for women in professions or business...the very word "woman" was strange and out of place." Madesin listened intently as her father talked politics with his friends, thus sowing the seeds for her own intense interest in political issues.
Phillips was a conspicuous leader at the Jessamine Female Institute, and in 1888, she formed a military company comprised entirely of females. She was chosen the captain of "The Main Avengers," whose members intended to offer their services after graduation to the United States in its fight against Spain.
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1899
Graduating class at Jessamine Female Institute.
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Phillips went on to Goucher college and then to study at the Peabody Conservatory of Music. Her ambitions to become a concert pianist ended prematurely when she injured her right arm, but this loss for the music world was a gain for the world of politics and social reform.
Without skipping a beat, she turned to the legal profession. In the Lexington Herald dated Sunday, December 24, 1916, an article comments on her initial days at the University of Kentucky Law School.:
Some conservative students disapproved of her entrance in their classes, believing their work would be retarded, but when the semester grades were posted on the bulletin board, their attitude changed: she had made all A's.
She graduated June, 1917 as the first woman honor graduate at the University's 50th commencement.
While practicing law in Lexington Phillips became involved with the local Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA), and she was quickly offered the position of executive secretary for the business and professional women's division of the national organization. In this job, she traveled thousands of miles surveying women as to the feasibility of a separate organization for business and professional women. Positive results led to her recommendation that the Business and Professional Women's organization (BPW) be founded. That being accomplished, Madesin Phillips promptly resigned and resumed her practice of law in New York City.
Later, she became the national president of BPW and in her annual address called for supporting organizational policies that were not regional-biased but were for the good of all women. In the 20s her concern was to get women to look beyond their own borders, whether local, state or country, long before the term "global inclusivity" was coined.
She
was that rare combination of a dreamer and a doer. She realized
that the BPW was ready to come into contact with the business women
of other countries. On August 26, 1930, in Geneva, Madesin Phillips'
dream was realized with the establishment of the International Federation
of Business and Professional Women. She spent the next twenty-five
years of her life dedicated to the Federation.
As one pores over the Lena Madesin Phillips Collection, housed at the Schlesinger Library of Radcliffe College, the meaning of "detail" takes on new dimensions. Inside the boxes are every single note of condolence at her mother's death, meticulous notes for her biography, hand-drawn caricatures, every class program, annual bank books, extensive correspondence, organizational publications, and photographs (personal and business). She kept "Letter Books," blue marbelized ledgers listing and dating every letter she received and answered, beginning in 1932.
Researchers find a letter addressed to President Franklin D. Roosevelt imploring him to include suffragist Susan B. Anthony in the proposed Mount Rushmore Memorial:
To us there seems needless irony in preparing for posterity an enduring memorial of America's liberators and at the same time omitting from it the liberator of one-half of our people.
Instantly
one draws a mental picture of a woman who carefully documented her
career path that led from being a music teacher in a small Kentucky
town to practicing law in New York City and ultimately to founding
the International Federation of Business and Professional Women.
She died unexpectedly in 1955, while traveling to the Middle East as part of a Federation study committee. She died being herself, a dreamer and a doer.
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Lena
Madesin Phillips at barbecue on grounds of 1898 Nicholasville
Centennial.
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