Posted
on March 12, 2014
On
this date in 1912, the organization that is now Girl Scouts of the
USA was born as Juliette Gordon Low officially registered the its
first 18 girls in Savannah, Georgia.
Scouting
started in 1907 when a British man named Robert Baden-Powell set up
Boy Scouts in the U.K., in order to help boys develop physically,
mentally, and spiritually. His idea caught on in a big way, and
within three at least 14 nations had Boy Scouts!
In
1910 Baden-Powell and his sister, Agnes Baden-Powell, introduced Girl
Guides in the U.K., a “sister organization for the Boy Scouts.
During the same year, a group of adults in Vermont (in the US.)
realized that their daughters were missing out; while the boys had
Boy Scout troops and meetings, the girls had no similar organization.
So Camp Fire Girls was started as the sister organization of the Boy
Scouts of America—with an official start date of March 17, 1912.
In
the meantime, however, Juliette Low had met the Baden-Powells while
she was living in the U.K., and she had caught Scout fever. When she
returned to her home in Savannah, Low called up a cousin and
announced, “I've got something for the girls of Savannah, and all of America, and all the world, and we're going to start it tonight!”
Isn't
it interesting that Low started working on her idea later than the
Camp Fire Girls people started on theirs, but she managed to
officially start her organization five days earlier!
When
Low first started her organization, she called it Girl Guides of
America, after the girls' organization in the U.K. Later in 1912, she
approached the leaders of Camp Fire Girls to see if they wanted to
merge. At the time, Camp Fire Girls were larger, and they said no,
thanks. Low approached another girls' organization, called Girl
Scouts of America, which had been founded in Iowa. Low asked if they
could merge, but the GSA founder was upset at Low, thinking she was a
copycat trying to steal members away from her group; instead of
merging with Low, she sued her!
(I
wonder how the founder of GSA felt when, the next year, Low changed
her name from “Guides” to “Scouts,” ending up with Girls
Scouts of the United States of America, or GSUSA. Now their names
were even more similar!)
It
ended up that Juliette Low's organization was the one that steadily
grew and grew. It now has more than 2 million girls and close to a
million adults on its membership rolls. GSA eventually died out, and
Camp Fire Girls, now a co-ed group called Camp Fire, has about
750,000 members. Do you suppose that the founders of those
groups ever wished that they had merged with Low's
organization?
 |
| I bet you already know that Girl Scouts sell cookies! |
Girl
Scouts USA is a secular, inclusive group. I would like to think that
its “we take all girls, from any background” attitude is one
reason it has grown so large. Polls show that Girl Scouts USA is one
of the most popular and respected charities in America, and some
would claim that Girl Scouts and Girl Guides are the world's most
important organizations solely for women and girls.
What's
in a name?
Juliette
Gordon Low's nickname was Daisy, and she was born in Savannah and
started her first troop there. Now we call the youngest Girl Scouts
“Daisies,” and two names for Girl Scout cookies are Savannahs and
Juliettes
(although the
latter has been discontinued).
These photos show Juliette Gordon Low as a young woman (left) and as an middle-aged woman (right).
Did
you know?
Japanese
American girls who were wrongfully confined in internment camps
during World War II often organized Girl Scout troops in the camps.
- In 1956 Martin Luther King, Jr., called the Girl Scouts a “force for desegregation” because the Scouts in many locales were forming racially integrated troops.
- More than 50 million Americans have been in Girl Scouts at one point or another in their lives!
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