Juliette Gordon Low Builds an Army of Girls

The year was 1912, and Savannah, Georgia hummed with the smell of magnolias and the sound of horse-drawn carriages clattering over cobblestones. In a grand house on a quiet street, a woman named Juliette Gordon Low pressed a telephone receiver to her ear and listened as hard as she could. Listening was never easy for Juliette. She had lost most of her hearing years before, when a grain of rice thrown at her wedding had lodged in her ear and gone wrong. The world often came to her muffled, as though heard through thick curtains. But on this spring afternoon, she heard something perfectly clear — an idea that made her heart leap. She had just returned from England, where she had met Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of the Boy Scouts. He had told her about troops of girls in Britain who were learning to camp, to navigate by the stars, to tend to the sick, and to serve their communities. Girls who were discovering that they were strong and capable and needed by the world. Juliette thought of the girls she knew back home in Savannah. Girls who were told to sit quietly. Girls who were told that adventure was for boys. Girls who had never been shown what they could truly do. She picked up that telephone and called her cousin. The words she spoke have been remembered ever since. "Come right over," she said. "I have something for the girls of Savannah, and all of America, and all the world, and we are going to start it tonight." And she did. That very evening, Juliette gathered eighteen girls in her carriage house. She spread a map across a wooden table and talked about trails and stars and first aid and courage. She talked about service — about going out into your neighborhood and truly helping. She talked about becoming someone the world could count on. The girls leaned in. Their eyes went wide. Not everyone believed in what Juliette was building. Some neighbors laughed. Some said that cooking and needlework were quite enough for young ladies. Some thought a partially deaf widow with grand dreams was just a bit too eccentric to be taken seriously. Juliette had heard that kind of talk before — or rather, she had learned not to let it stop her. She had grown up watching her own mother run hospitals during the Civil War. She had seen what women could do when the world gave them a chance, and what they could do even when it did not. So she pressed on. She sold her pearl necklace to pay for camping equipment. She traveled the country by train, knocking on doors, speaking in church halls and school gymnasiums, inviting girls to join. She wrote letters with her own hand — thousands of them — describing a future where every American girl, no matter where she lived or how much her family had, could belong to something bigger than herself. Within a year, there were troops in Georgia, in Pennsylvania, in New York. Within a decade, there were hundreds of thousands of Girl Scouts across America, hiking through forests, learning to read compasses, bandaging wounds, growing gardens, and standing a little taller. Juliette Gordon Low died in 1927. Tucked inside the pocket of her dress, they found a simple note from the Girl Scouts she had founded. It said: "You are not only the first Girl Scout. You are the best Girl Scout of them all." She had started with eighteen girls in a carriage house and changed the lives of millions. Sometimes the bravest thing a person can do is believe that girls — all girls — deserve a chance to be great. Juliette believed it with her whole heart. And tonight, somewhere across this wide and beautiful country, a Girl Scout is proving she was right.