Phillips, Lena Madesin (15 September 1881–21 May 1955), lawyer, feminist, and founder of the International Federation of Business and Professional Women, was born Anna Lena Phillips in Nicholasville, Kentucky, the daughter of William Henry Phillips, a judge, and Alice Shook, a musician. At age eleven Phillips changed her name to Madesin in honor of her older brother who was studying medicine, “medecin,” in Paris. Phillips’s mother was a gifted musician and a staunch Methodist who impressed upon her daughter a high regard for education, music, and religion. Her father was the more easygoing of her parents and the one whose disposition Phillips felt she had inherited. Madesin and her father “were made of the same stuff,” Phillips wrote, “alike in temperament and taste” (Sergio, p. 10)....
