Philena McKeen (June 13, 1822 – May 13, 1898) was an American educator and the 11th principal of Abbot Academy in Andover, Massachusetts.

During her thirty-year tenure, she managed the school in its "Golden Age" and established a curriculum that "educated for life.

[6] In 1855, she and her sister Phebe McKeen accepted jobs at the newly founded Western Female Seminary in Oxford, Ohio.

[7][8] Philena McKeen's colleagues at Abbot Academy encouraged her to maintain the status quo, but she saw a school that was in desperate need of improvement.

[9] To raise money, she sold waste paper from students and organized lectures and other events with entrance fees.

[10] Boys from nearby Phillips Academy and Andover Theological Seminary were invited to perform in plays and participate in games.

McKeen soon had the funds to clean buildings, add carpets and wall pictures, and purchase new silverware for the dining hall.

It wasn't until the 1870s when Cecil Bancroft became the new principal of Phillips Academy after the death of Samuel Harvey Taylor that they began to catch up with Abbot's curriculum.

In 1875, McKeen purchased a telescope and observatory with funds raised by Mary Belcher, a Latin and astronomy teacher.

Abbot students had access to not only the books of their own school but those of Phillips Academy and the Andover Theological Seminary, too.

She severely limited interaction with Phillips Academy boys with the hope of controlling what is described by a historian as an "ominous sexual awakening".

McKeen organized a great event for the occasion attended by about two thousand guests on a lawn near the South Church of Andover.

The following year she and her sister Phebe authored a semicentennial history of the school published by Warren F. Draper, a fellow trustee.

She nearly resigned in 1888 when funding fell short and increasingly suffered from rheumatism, but renewed financial support from Warren Draper allowed construction to begin.

She was a director of AVIS and worked to preserve and beautify a triangle of land, known as the Manse Green, opposite the South Church at a street intersection.

[2] Abbot Academy continued to compete with colleges into the twentieth century as McKeen had in the nineteenth.

[33] It could not last, however, and the school created a four-year college preparatory curriculum in the early twentieth century to appeal to a new generation of women.