Transcript of a speech given to a 1978 meeting of the American Physical Society which recounts Phillips' early education; undergraduate education at Battle Creek College; the summer school at University of Michigan; and her graduate education at University of California, Berkeley, with J. Robert Oppenheimer, Harvey E. White, Ernest O. Lawrence, Felix Bloch, and Linus Pauling. Phillips also discusses her perception of the attitude toward women in physics during the thirties and later. Respondents were asked to discuss their choice of physics as a profession and the course of their careers, their satisfactions and disappointments, the changes they saw in working and teaching conditions in the field, and relations within the community and with the society at large.