Daisy's Girls: The Founding of the Girl Scouts

She was 51, restless, and had just discovered her life's calling in the last place she expected: watching English girls learn to camp, cook, and fend for themselves. On March 12, 1912, Juliette Gordon Low gathered 18 girls in her hometown of Savannah, Georgia, and told them they were going to do something no American girls had ever done. She called them Girl Guides.

"Daisy," as everyone called her, had been born into Savannah society in 1860. She lived with severe hearing loss from childhood, but it never slowed her — she traveled, painted, and threw herself into life with infectious energy. In 1911, visiting England, she met Robert Baden-Powell, the Boer War hero whose Boy Scouts were sweeping Britain. Inspired, she threw herself into his new movement for girls — and then decided America needed its own.

The first meeting took place in a carriage house in Savannah. Low had a radical idea for 1912: that girls should be able to do everything boys could — hike, camp, read maps, play sports, learn first aid — and earn badges proving it. The badges, in subjects from homemaking to aviation, were revolutionary in an era when most assumed a girl's future held only one path. At first the girls called themselves Girl Guides, after the English movement; in 1913 the American organization took the name it still carries: the Girl Scouts.

Low gave the movement everything she had — her time, her fortune, her formidable charm. Legend has it she even sold her treasured pearl necklace to keep the young organization afloat. She crisscrossed the country organizing troops, insisting that girls from every background belonged. When she died in 1927, the movement she had started with 18 girls was already spreading across the country.

The movement kept growing new traditions. The famous cookie sales began in 1917, when an Oklahoma troop baked cookies as a fundraiser — the start of a century-long ritual. During both World Wars, Girl Scouts sold war bonds, tended victory gardens, and volunteered in hospitals, proving Low's belief that girls could serve their country as fully as any boy.

More than a century later, the Girl Scouts remain one of the largest girl-led organizations on earth, its members counted in the millions. Generations of American women — astronauts, senators, scientists, entrepreneurs — got their first taste of leadership tying knots and selling cookies in a green sash. All because a 51-year-old woman decided girls deserved adventures too.

Photo: Juliette Gordon Low pinning a badge on a Girl Scout, public domain.