April 3, 2019 • 37 mins
The, founder of the Girl Scouts of the United States of America had an early life that’s somewhat surprising. But she was deeply interested in helping other from an early age, and when she learned about the scouting movement, she dedicated her life to it.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. Holly,
were you ever a Girl Scout? No? I was a
camp fire girl, really yeah, and I actually like um.
(00:23):
For many years, I was pretty snooty about that fact.
I was. Really I was a camp fire girl when
I lived outside of Seattle when I was little, and
then we moved to Florida and the only option was
Girl Scouts. And I may have made some disparaging comments
about how I thought my uniform was a lot sharper
than the Girl Scout ones. But that's because I was
(00:45):
not a nice child, just like I was an adult.
I was a Brownie and that was as far as
I got because for reasons I really cannot put my
finger on at this point, you know, all my forty
years later, I didn't enjoy brownies as much. Uh. And
I was also in four H and when I was
(01:07):
getting ready to move up in school, my mom was like,
we should pick one of these two activities, and I
picked four h rather than going on farther with the
Girl Scouts. But anyway, that was probably smarter than what
I did, which was always just add more activities, just
like I do is an adult. Yeah, my mom was
(01:29):
the person who was responsible for all of the driving
when it came to these kinds of activities. So I
think this was largely my mom wanting one less thing
to have to ship us all the way from way
out in the country to slightly less far out in
the country. Anyway, we're having this conversation because today we
have the extremely frequent listener request of Juliette Gordon Lowe,
(01:51):
who was the founder of the Girl Scouts to the
United States of America. And when I say a frequent
listener request, this is just from the last couple of
years of email and our Twitter mentions, and it has
come from Becky, Camille, Sarah, Katie, Anna, Alison, Lindsay, Nicola
and Amy and I know, farther back in the world
of things we can no longer really search easily, there
(02:13):
are other people who have asked for us to talk
about her. Aside from the fact that so many people
have asked us to talk about juliet Gordon Lowe, really
a lot of things about her life surprised me and
are very different from what I imagined her life to
be like before getting into this. If the only pictures
of her you have seen are the ones from later
in her life in her Scout uniform, she looks like
(02:34):
an almost totally different person from her pictures from her youth.
So I was very intrigued by all that. Juliette Gordon
Lowe was born Juliette McGill Kinzie Gordon on October thirty one,
eighteen sixty. She was nicknamed Daisy, and that's still the
name that she's known by in much of the world
of Girl Scouts, as well as by some of her biographers.
(02:55):
H and her parents were William Washington Gordon the second
and Eleanor Kinsey Gordon, who is known as Nellie. Juliette
was the second of six children. Her siblings were Eleanor, Alice, William, Mabel,
and Arthur. The family were committed Episcopalians who attended Christ
Church in Savannah, Georgia. The gardens were a really good
(03:16):
example of how one family could have complicated loyalties during
the U. S Civil War. William's family had been in
Georgia for generations, and part of their wealth came from
the cotton industry, so in addition to having an enslaved
workforce at the Gordon home, their income was coming from
enslaved labor. But then Nellie's family conversely went all the
(03:37):
way back to the founders of Chicago, Illinois, and in
general they were opposed to slavery, and some of them
were dedicated abolitionists. So in very broad strokes, Nellie's and
William's families were on opposite sides of the war. The
men in Nellie's family served in the US military, while
Williams served to the Confederacy, But at the same time
(03:57):
it was more complicated than that. Nellie gradually came to
believe that the war was necessary for Southern independence, and
that Southern independence itself was necessary. But even then, after
Savannah surrendered, she entertained people like US General William too
come to sherman at the family home. Juliette, of course,
is only six months old when the war started, so
(04:19):
she was too young to really understand what was going
on for most of it as she became a toddler,
though she was just fiercely loyal to her father and
sure that whatever he was doing was the right thing.
Nellie Gordon and the children went to Chicago for the
last few months of the war, and by the time
they arrived the whole family was malnourished. Juliette was also
(04:40):
extremely sick with what her mother described as brain fever,
and this was kind of a catch all term that
included serious illnesses like meningitis and encephalitis. Juliette eventually recovered
from this illness, but she was chronically ill for most
of her life. She contracted malaria sometime in her youth,
and she was prone to earaches and ear infections that
(05:01):
could cause her to temporarily lose summer all of her hearing.
These ear infections and her malaria tended to recur anytime
she was exhausted or stressed or sick with something else,
and she was also prone to abscesses, including in her ears,
and then later on in her life, she developed gout.
Once the Civil War was over, the Gordon's returned to Savannah,
and from that point overall Juliette had a happy childhood.
(05:25):
The family had to adjust to a new economy, one
that did not rely on enslaved labor, but Juliette was
not really conscious of this shift. She was accident prone
and eccentric, which led her family to start calling her
crazy Daisy. Her eccentricity also carried over to her written correspondence,
which tended to have so many spelling mistakes that historians
(05:46):
have speculated that she actually had a learning disability. And
there are scans of a lot of her letters online,
and in addition to there being a lot of mistakes,
there is a lot of talk about the mistakes and
how many there are. She also had a very kind
and generous heart. She and her friends like to put
on plays and sell tickets to them to raise money
for charities, including some that were set out to help
(06:06):
Native Americans. One of her favorite plays to stage was
about Mary, Queen of Scott's. Another of her childhood projects
included a short lived club called Helping Hands, which was
meant to help people who were less fortunate than they were,
but this club had to be disbanded during an epidemic
of yellow fever. You could describe some of her childhood
work as it's the thought that counts. Some of Juliet's
(06:29):
family called Helping Hands helpless hands because, for example, they
wanted to make clothes to donate to a family in need,
but they really didn't know how to do that, so
the results of their labors were not really wearable. Ideas.
Yeah they were. They were trying to make clothes for people,
and they didn't They didn't really know how to sew.
Starting when she was twelve, Juliette was educated in a
(06:50):
series of boarding schools, two of them in Virginia, one
in New Jersey, and then a French finishing school called
Mademoiselle Charbonnier in New York City. She made several very
close friends in these schools, including Abby Lippett and Mary
Gail Carter, who were her very best friends for the
rest of her life. She also studied art in New York,
including sculpture and painting, and she became very good at
(07:13):
painting onto China. In eighty tragedy struck the Gordon family.
Juliette's seventeen year old sister, Alice died of scarlet fever.
The entire family was grief stricken. Juliet's older sister, Eleanor
was away in Europe, so since Juliette was then the
oldest daughter at home, she had to keep things running
while her mother was consumed with grief. Juliette also tried
(07:36):
to keep her chin up and suthe the rest of
the family's heartbreak that on its own would have just
been a huge load to try to shoulder, but to
make things even harder, Juliette's mother interpreted her sort of
soldiering on as evidence that she wasn't all that sad
about her sister. Nellie accused Juliette of being selfish and shallow,
and Juliette knew that, in her own words quote, there
(07:59):
is more than one kind of sorrow, and that born
in silence is not less genuine because it is not
always seen. But Juliett also did worry that maybe her
sister Alice had died thinking that she didn't love her.
I feel like this whole thing is like evidence of
how grief can just mess with people, like, oh yeah,
I'm sure her mom also was seeing that through a
veil of her own grief and like did not have
(08:21):
the magnanimity of heart available to be like, oh no,
this is just how she's doing it, um yea. And
they had they sort of butted heads a lot for
for pretty much all of of Juliette's life. They had
personalities that conflicted with each other a lot of times
and in ways that could just come off as seeming
(08:42):
like they were angry at each other, but it was
really more like they just had different ways of approaching
the world, the misunderstandings of family. But in the midst
of all of this emotional turmoil, Juliette became acquainted with
William mackay Lowe. His family had previously been the Gordon's
neighbors in Savannah, but they had moved to England in
eighteen sixty seven. Because Juliet's father, brother, and now love
(09:05):
interest were all named William, h We're gonna call this
William by his nickname of Billow, just to try to
simplify a little bit, especially because we're going to get
to parts where multiple Williams are in the same room.
Below was very handsome, and he listened to all of
Juliette's grief about her sister and her frustrations with her
relationship with her mother. Juliette compared these conversations with him
(09:29):
to her most intimate friendships with her girlfriends in boarding school.
Less than three months after Alice's death, Juliette was deeply
in love with Billow, and she was also ashamed of
those feelings because she thought that she should really still
be mourning her sister and not finding joy with a
young man. On top of that, she knew that her
(09:49):
family was not going to approve of this match. The
Gordons were very well off, but they also valued hard work,
and Billow did not. He was set to inherit a
massive fortune when his father died, and he had no
plans to work at all, and Billow's family wouldn't have
approved of juliet either. Billow's father had made it clear
that he did not want his son to marry an
(10:11):
American or Mary during his own lifetime at all. So
Juliette and Billow courted in secret. They wrote to each
other after Billow went back to England, but eventually he
stopped writing to her, and at first juliet I just
thought something must have gotten misdirected or lost in the mail,
But as time went on with still no more letters,
she became determined to go see him and find out
(10:34):
what was going on. To that end, in two juliet
convinced her parents to let her take a tour of Europe,
as her older sister had done, but really she was
on a secret mission to find Billow and get him
to answer for his behavior. And we're going to talk
about all of that after we first pause for a
little sponsor break. So, as we said earlier, the Gordons
(11:03):
and the Lowe's had been neighbors back in Savannah. They
were family friends, so it was reasonable for juliet to
go call on Billow's sisters while she was in England.
She didn't do that. She paid them a visit, she
did not tell them why she was really there. It
turned out that Billow was not home that day, but
Juliette did manage to take a look around the house
and find his room. His mirror was covered with letters
(11:27):
and sketches that she had sent to him, but not
from anything from her more recent correspondence. She concluded that
Billow's father had discovered their letters and was keeping her
mail from him. Juliette went on her tour of the
European continent, but she was driven to distraction by the
thought of seeing Billow the whole time. She finally resigned
(11:48):
herself to the idea that it just wasn't going to happen.
Shortly before she returned home, she sent him a telegram
that said goodbye. I sail on the Gala. But then
and a drum add a turn of events. Just before
the ship set sail, one of the crew brought her
a telegram of her own, and it was from Billow,
who revealed that he had been looking for her as well.
(12:10):
This is such a good movie moment, and it did
lift Juliette's spirits, but not for long. She decided that
a relationship would Billow just could not work out. Both
of their families objected, and on top of that, Billow
was going to spend the next few years studying at Oxford. Juliette, though,
was I mean. She was an available, attractive, lovely young woman,
and on the way home she caught the eye of
(12:31):
another passenger on the ship. This was a captain who
fell for her completely, but as soon as she realized
that he was serious about her, Juliette rejected him because
if she could not have Billow, she did not want anyone.
She had made her formal debut into society, and after
getting home again, she received other proposals as well, and
she turned all of them down. Two years later, one
(12:54):
of Juliette's sisters got married and that brought all of
her feelings about Billow back to the surface. She came
up with another reason to go abroad, this time to
visit her school friend Mary, but once again Juliet's real
motive was to try to see Billow. She left in
May of eighty four, two years after deciding to give
Billow up and four years after having met him in
(13:15):
the first place. Even though she was there to visit Mary,
Juliette accepted an invitation to stay with the Low sisters,
and of course this was because she hoped it would
let her run into their brother. This time, this worked.
Juliette and Billow confess their loved each other in person,
and then once again they decided, because of all those
reasons from two years ago that still existed, not to
(13:37):
pursue it. Juliette reunited with Mary's family in Scotland, and
they were a little annoyed to learn what had been
going on with that visit to the Lows, And before
she went back to the United States, Juliette paid the
Lows yet another visit. While she was there, she and
Below saw one another again, and then the two of
them decided, in spite of all of those law tical reasons,
(14:00):
that they had previously decided against it to actually try
to be together. About six months later, in January, the
ear pain that had been troubling Juliette off and on
for much of her life became really acute. She went
to a specialist who tried a procedure involving silver nitrate,
and there were some complications, and that led to even
(14:21):
more pain and the loss of most of her hearing.
In that year. Billow was visiting at the time, and
he was there for Juliette as she went through a
long series of procedures and visits to specialists, all to
try to repair the damage to her ear, and this
was what led Juliette's father, William to alter his opinion
about whether Billow was right for his daughter. Juliette was
(14:43):
in pain and felt terrible about this whole situation, not
just because of her health, but also because a lot
of blame was being thrown around about exactly whose fault
this situation was. Billow boosted her spirits and William reluctantly
he agreed to give the couple his blessing williams us
and came with some conditions, though Billow had to live
(15:03):
within his financial means. The couple needed to spend at
least six months of each year in Savannah, and Billow's father, Andrew,
had to agree that Billow would continue to have his
financial support. There was just no way that William was
going to allow his daughter to get married if there
was a chance that her husband might wind up cut
off from his inheritance for some reason, which would have
(15:24):
left him with no way of supporting her. Finally, William
and Andrew finished their negotiation for the marriage, which included
a year long engagement starting when Billow headed back to
England in February of But what none of the Gordons
really knew at this point was that Billow's reputation back
in London would have been considered scandalous. In Savannah, he
(15:47):
ran in the same circles as Edward Albert, also known
as Bertie, Prince of Wales, whose life was full of
affairs and scandals. The Gordons and their friends all knew
about the reputation of the Prince of Wales, but they
didn't know that Billow was connected to that same circle
and was regarded in kind of the same way. They
got a glimpse of it during the engagement, though, when
(16:09):
Billow placed a bet on a horse race that was
so big that it was covered in the press, the
Gordons were livid, and Juliette tried to downplay the bet
as something that he had placed on behalf of several
other people and not something that was entirely his own money. Then,
on June six, Billow's father died, he came into his
(16:29):
whole inheritance. Juliette and Billow decided not to put off
the wedding in light of Andrew's death, and they got
married on December six. After the wedding, as guests were
showering the couple with rice, Juliette got a grain of
rice stuck in her ear, that same ear that had
gone through all of those complications the year before. After
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the honeymoon, when she hadn't been able to dislodge it,
Juliette went to the doctor to try to have the
rice removed, and all of this damaged her ear even further,
and she lost almost all of her hearing in it.
She also contracted bronchitis and spent most of the first
months of her marriage too sick to even climb the
stairs in their home in early May of eight seven,
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Juliette started losing the hearing in her other ear as well.
She consulted a doctor who suggested that it was a
sympathetic reaction to her previous hearing loss. She saw a
number of specialists and tried different treatments over the rest
of her life, but none of them ever restored her hearing.
It was something that sometimes she would improve as maybe
her ear drum healed up a little, but then a
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lot of times it would get worse again. Her hearing
loss didn't affect her speech, but she couldn't always understand
people when they were speaking to her. Juliette had a
really hard time adjusting to being a gentleman's wife. At first,
they didn't have a permanent home of their own, and
they were releasing large estates in England and Scotland. Billow
finally bought a fifty five acre estate in Warwickshire in
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eighteen eighty nine, which they expanded to include twenty bedrooms
huge stables. Juliette really loved finally having a permanent place
of her own. It also made it easier for her
to be a little philanthropic. Billow was really opposed to
the idea of her dedicating herself to philanthropy full time.
He seemed to think that it would lead her to
(18:17):
judge his life of idleness, so she tended to do
smaller things like visiting people in need and donating vegetables
and flowers from their gardens. Juliette really wanted to be useful, though,
and she finally got the chance to do that during
the Spanish American War. Her mother back during the Civil
War had hated being separated from her father, so Nellie
(18:39):
had made the decision that she would accompany William to
Florida while where he was going to be serving in
the military, and she was going to start a convalescent
home for soldiers there. Juliette traveled back to the United States.
She joined her mother in Florida, and together they cared
for men who were recovering from illnesses like malaria, measles,
and typhoid. Juliette loved having me full work to do,
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and when her father was transferred and Nelly planned to
go with him, Juliett volunteered to stay behind and continue
on with the convalescent home. But then the war ended
in August and that home was closed down. Not long
after this, Juliette had another major change in her life,
and we will get to that after another quick sponsor break.
(19:28):
Juliet's marriage to Billow was really struggling. By the turn
of the twentieth century. Juliette had surgery to remove abscesses
and cists from her abdomen, and this may have affected
her reproductive system as well. Regardless of whether that was
a factor, she and Billow did not have any children,
and Juliet really blamed herself about this, and she felt
(19:48):
a lot of shame about it. I mean, there's still
some stigma about people who want to have children and
can't today. This was worse when she was living and
she she had felt ashamed of the fact that she
had not had any children. As their marriage went on,
Billow spent more and more time away from home, and
his expenses became really extravagant, including spending a lot on
(20:11):
betting and on race horses. Billow also became involved with
another woman named Anna Bridges Bateman, and it's not clear
exactly when that relationship started, but Juliette hosted Anna at
their home at least once, not knowing that she and
Billow were having an affair. Anna also stayed in their
home after Juliette did know about that affair, but Juliette
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felt like she couldn't really say anything about it. By
nineteen o one, Juliette was talking about pursuing a divorce,
and this was something that English law made very difficult.
The most logical option was to seek a divorce on
the grounds of infidelity. It was clearly what was going on,
but she didn't really want to do this because it
meant publicizing to the world that her husband had an affair,
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and Billow did not want her to do it either,
because it would have meant publicizing to the war world
who he was having an affair with. In nineteen o two,
they separated, and by that fall Juliett was realizing that
she was happier without Billow than she had been with him,
and Juliette started visiting family and friends and traveling more.
After a while, Juliette started hearing rumors that Below was
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drinking heavily and that his health was increasingly poor. He
died on June n o five, at which point he
and Juliette were still separated but not divorced. He had
requested for Anna to handle his funeral arrangements, which the
family agreed to, and he had also rewritten his will,
leaving almost everything to Anna, including what was supposed to
(21:40):
be Juliette's annual allowance. With the help of bellow sisters,
Juliette successfully contested the will. Anna still got a sizeable inheritance,
but Juliette got a lovesome and annuity and the Low's
house in Savannah. It was enough for her to be comfortable.
Less than a year later, an old family friend named
(22:00):
Archie Hunter proposed to her, but she turned him down,
describing herself as too old and deaf to try again,
especially since she was not in love with him. She
had a whole lot of like, I just don't love
that guy. He seems to be into me, but I'm
not that into him. For the next several years after
her estranged husband's death, Juliette traveled the world. She visited relatives,
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and she did some charitable work, and in a lot
of ways she was enjoying herself, but she still wanted
something to do. As always, she wanted to be useful,
but she couldn't really find a cause that really just
captured her heart. This lack of direction changed basically overnight
when she met General Sir Robert Baden Powell in nineteen eleven.
(22:44):
Biden Powell was regarded as a war hero for his
leadership during the Siege of Mafficking in the Boer Wars.
He was also the founder of the Boy Scouts. I
have that siege on my list for a potential future
episode because of course it is a lot more complicated
than that. Uh, And Biden Powell is not universally regarded
(23:04):
as a hero depending on who you're talking to, But
we've also had just a lot of nineteenth and twentieth
century lately, so maybe on like a little farther down
the road. So uh is being the founder of the
Boy Scouts makes a sound as though founding the Boy
Scouts was something he intentionally set out to do, but
really it was almost an accident. During his career with
(23:26):
the British Army, Biden Powell wrote a couple of books
about scouting. They were meant to teach military men about
reconnaissance and about being a soldier. And then when he
got back to Britain after serving in the Boer Wars,
he was surprised to discover that groups of boys had
been using these books to organize themselves into little scouting patrols,
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often with their own names for the patrol and their
own uniforms. At the time, British society was concerned about
whether boys and young men were self reliant enough, and
whether British citizens were adequately prepared from a mill terry perspective,
so people started calling for Baden Powell to formalize these patrols,
and the result of that was the Boy Scouts. And
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of course there were girls who were interested in scouting
as well, and some girls had formed their own patrols
already or had tried to join in with the boys.
But Biden Powell and others thought that it was best
to separate these groups by gender, so he enlisted his
sister Agnes to start the corresponding girl Guides. When Juliette
Gordon Lowe met Robert Baden Powell and learned about the
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Scouting movement, that was it. At the age of fifty one,
low had found her life's work. Scouting combined so many
traits that had been central to her life and her worldview.
She had always wanted to be helpful. She had a
strong sense of civic duty. She loved the outdoors, including
hiking and hunting. Some of the most important relationships in
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her life were friendships with other girls now women, that
she had made when she was young. Her religious faith,
and her compassion, and her idea that childhood should be
fun and happy. It was all right there in the
Scouting movement. She and Biden Powell began working together within
the Scouting movement in Britain. In nineteen eleven, Low helped
(25:13):
established two Girl Guy patrols in Scotland and one in England.
Then in nineteen twelve, she and Biden Powell traveled across
the Atlantic to bring the Scouting movement to the United States.
It's clear that there was an attraction between the two
of them, and, according to some accounts, at one point,
while they were working together in the UK, he proposed
(25:33):
to her, But on that voyage to New York, Biden
Powell became secretly engaged to another passenger named Alive st
Clair Solmes. We don't really know how Low felt about this.
She found out along with the rest of the world,
when it was formally announced more than six months later.
Once she got back to Savannah, Low called her cousin
Nina Anderson Pape and said, come right over, I've got
(25:57):
something for the girls of Savannah and all America, and
we're going to start it tonight. And then they got
to work establishing Savannah's first Girl Guide's patrol. And although
a lot of things about this patrol have become part
of Girl Scout lore, including exactly when they had their
first meeting, who their first members were, and that one
of Juliette's nieces was the first to be enrolled, the
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documentation of those first few months is pretty fuzzy. Regardless.
Though there were several Girl Guide patrols in Savannah, including
one at the Savannah Female Orphan Asylum, Low particularly wanted
the Girl Scouts to be a positive force in the
lives of girls who were living in poverty, so she
made a special effort to make sure that patrols were
established for them and that participating was affordable. Those first
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patrols in Savannah often included Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish girls together,
but in general the patrols were separated by social class.
Organizers worried that upper class parents would prohibit their daughters
from participating if less affluent girls were included in the
same patrol, and in Savannah they were also segregated by race.
(27:03):
Separate patrols were established for African American girls, including one
that was led by one of the Gordon family's household staff.
Juliette's family was happy to see that she had found
something to occupy herself and that it was clearly making
her so happy, But at the same time they also
remembered her being quote crazy Daisy and the group that
(27:24):
they nicknamed the Helpless Hands, So they really thought Juliette
might make a mess of this whole thing or just
lose interest, but the opposite happened. Girl Guides continued to
grow in n Juliette started contacting the leaders of similar
organizations for girls, encouraging them to become part of the
Girl Guides. It was clear that only one organization could
(27:46):
be viewed as the sister organization to the Boy Scouts,
and Juliette wanted that to be the Girl Guides, so
she tried to get the Girl Pioneers, the Campfire Girls,
and other organizations to join her. This was not altogether successful,
and sometimes it became outright acrimonious. Low had an ongoing
dispute with Lynda Beard, who had established the Girl Pioneers
(28:09):
in nineteen twelve, and Clara Elicitor Lane had also formed
a group called the Girl Scouts of America in Chicago,
and she went on to accused low of stealing her
idea and the name for it, but Juliette Gordon Lowe persisted.
She carried on after her father died in nineteen twelve,
after she learned about Robert Baden Powell's secret engagement, and
(28:30):
after other women she recruited to help moved on to
different things. She also traveled back and forth between the
US and the UK, helping the movement in Europe and
bringing new ideas and techniques back to the US with her.
She also focused on taking this movement national in the
United States, and to that end, she changed the name
from Girl Guides to Girl Scouts, which is something a
(28:51):
lot of people did not want her to do at all,
including Robert Baden Powell. She did, though, eventually convinced him
to approve of the cha change. Bo also established a
national headquarters for the Girl Scouts in Washington, d C.
And it started growing into a formal organization with a
professional paid staff. In nineteen thirteen, the first US specific
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Girl Scout handbook was published, called How Girls Can Help
Their Country. As all of this was going on, Low
was continuing to struggle with her health. All of the
same illnesses and conditions that have been part of her
life so far continued to be present. She also underwent
radium treatment for her gout in the nineteen teens and
experienced ongoing back pain from an injury. None of this
(29:37):
stopped her work, though. She kept crossing the Atlantic and
recruiting leaders and raising money and evangelizing about the Scouting movement.
By nineteen fourteen, it was essentially a full time job.
In nineteen fifteen, not directly connected to scouting, Low was
awarded US Patent one one two to five Liquid Container
(29:58):
for use with garbage cans or the which was basically
a folding pattern for a sheet of waterproof paper that
could be used in conjunction with a garbage can to
hold liquid and disposed of along with its contents. She
was also awarded a design patent for the trefoil design
of the first Girl Scout badge. I guess this could
really be tangentially connected to scouting because it reminds me
(30:20):
of the kinds of trash cans we would have at camp.
Lowe's mother died in February of nineteen seventeen, and by
then World War One had been going on for nearly
three years, and Girl Scouts had been flourishing as groups
of girls dedicated themselves to the war effort. They were
raising money and rolling bandages and working with the Red
(30:40):
Cross and generally trying to be of service. There were,
of course, plenty of administrative headaches and growing pains throughout
all of this, and there had been concerns that Scouting
was going to cause girls to become too masculine or
too headstrong. But in general, by the end of World
War One, the Girl Scouts were recognizable all across the
US and generally were associated with being helpful, kind and respectful.
(31:05):
And then by the nineteen twenties people had started to
see Girl Scouts as an alternative to the flapper lifestyle.
Biographer Stacy Cordery described it as quote the antidote to flappers.
Scouting advocates also viewed the movement as a force for
world peace because children around the world were participating in
an organization that had a focus on duty and service
(31:25):
and common goals no matter what location they were in.
All of this helped to keep the organization going when
those immediate wartime needs were over. Throughout all of this,
the Girl Scout Organization occupied an interesting place in terms
of social issues. Often it tried to remain politically neutral.
For example, the organization did not take a formal position
(31:47):
on the issue of women's suffrage, but at the same time,
in some ways it was more progressive than other similar
organizations when many organizations banned black members in any capacity.
Some of the first patrols in the North were integrated,
and troops for African American girls existed in the South
almost from the beginning. The first troop for Native American
(32:09):
girls was established in nineteen eighteen, although there were almost
certainly Native girls involved in scouting before that. In ninety two,
the first Latina group was established in Houston, Texas, and
in nineteen twenty three, at a time when disability was
far more visibly stigmatized than it is in the US today,
the organization decided that Scouts with disabilities would be eligible
(32:30):
to earn the Golden Eaglet, which was its highest honor,
and this was something that Lowe argued for strenuously. As
she was making those arguments, Juliette Gordon Lowe was also
being treated for breast cancer, which may have been connected
to her earlier radium treatments. By this point, she had
stepped down as president of the Girl Scouts, taking the
(32:51):
role of founder and focusing on expanding scouting internationally. She
told almost no one about her illness, and she continued
working even as she got er and developed lead poisoning
because of one of her treatments. Juliette Gordon Lowe continued
to work for the international Scouting movement until her death
on January seventeenth, ninety seven, at the age of sixty six.
(33:13):
By that point, the Girl Scouts had a hundred and
sixty eight thousand members and had held national and international
conferences and established camps for girls. The Girl Scouts had
moved from homemade uniforms that varied from one group to
another to standard uniforms that could be purchased, and troops
had also started selling cookies to raise money. Troops had
(33:34):
been established all across the United States, including Alaska and Hawaii,
which weren't states yet, and in Puerto Rico. Juliette Gordon
Lowe is one of only three Americans to be awarded
the Silver Fish, which is the highest honor in Girl Guides.
She earned that award in nineteen nineteen, and honors and
awards have continued after her death. In ninety four, a
(33:55):
US Liberty ship was named the S. S. Juliette low
Juliette Orton Lowe has also been commemorated on a stamp,
and had schools named after her, and been inducted into
the National Women's Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls. Her
birthplace was registered as a National Historical Landmark in nineteen
sixty five, and a federal building complex was named after
(34:16):
her in nineteen eighty three. In twelve, she was posthumously
awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Then Today, of course,
the Girl Scouts of the United States America still exists.
There are two point five million members, including about seven
hundred and fifty thousand adult members and leaders. And man,
those cookies and the cookies, I I'm not gonna lie. Um.
(34:41):
I did not imagine that somebody who started an organization
that has so much focus on being self reliant and
supporting other girls would have spent so much of her
young adult life Chason after a boy like that just
surprised me a little, shouldn't though I might have done
(35:03):
the same thing if I had been in her place. Yeah, totally.
I mean I was like one of those kids that
was raised by a dad who was very much like
from the time I was little, like you gotta take
care of yourself all the time. But I still would have,
you know, chased after a boy. I imagine I wish
it had been a boy that was more of her affection.
(35:24):
The heart wants what it wants, Tracy. Yeah, do you
have a little bit of listener mail. Yeah, this is
from Janine and it's um it's related to this podcast,
which just has a completely, uh completely coincidental connection to
another recent podcast. So Janine says, I'm quite behind on
your podcast. So I just listened to the episode from
back in February on Mary Winston Jackson and was delighted
(35:48):
to hear she was a Girl Scout leader. I'm also
a Girl Scout leader and was just so excited and
moved to hear about her work mentoring girls and especially
in integrating the councils in her area. I was not
surprised us that she continued to mentor young people throughout
her life. I think one of the most rewarding parts
of being a Girl Scout leader is the opportunity to
mentor girls and young women, and I think Jackson would
(36:09):
have agreed with me. I just talked to my Daisy
Troop about courageous and strong women this week as we
reviewed the courageous and strong part of the Girl Scout Law.
I was sadly unfamiliar with Mary Winston Jackson before listening
to your episode, so she did not feature in the discussion,
but you can bet she will next time we talk
about it. Thanks so much for the work you do.
My degrees are in history and related subjects, and I
(36:31):
appreciate the research you put into the show and the
sourceless to attach at the end. Keep up the good work, Janine.
And then Janine also sent us cat pictures, which we
always appreciate. Her cats are a tabby named Walnut and
a black wood named Hildegard, of course, named for Hildegard
von Bingen. I was delighted by all of that and
delighted to see these cats, So thank you, Janine. Uh
(36:55):
if you would like to write to us about this
or any other podcast where history podcast and How Stuff
Works dot com, and then you can find us all
over social media at miss in History. That is where
you will find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram. You
can come to our website, which is missed in History
dot com, where you will find show notes for all
the episodes Holly and I have worked on together, a
searchable archive of every episode ever, and that's where we
(37:18):
will have the information about any upcoming shows that we
have out in the world. You can also subscribe to
our show on Apple, podcast, to the iHeart radio app,
and wherever else you get podcasts. Stuffy miss in History
Class is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works.
(37:38):
For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart
Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. Holly,
were you ever a Girl Scout? No? I was a
camp fire girl, really yeah, and I actually like um.
(00:23):
For many years, I was pretty snooty about that fact.
I was. Really I was a camp fire girl when
I lived outside of Seattle when I was little, and
then we moved to Florida and the only option was
Girl Scouts. And I may have made some disparaging comments
about how I thought my uniform was a lot sharper
than the Girl Scout ones. But that's because I was
(00:45):
not a nice child, just like I was an adult.
I was a Brownie and that was as far as
I got because for reasons I really cannot put my
finger on at this point, you know, all my forty
years later, I didn't enjoy brownies as much. Uh. And
I was also in four H and when I was
(01:07):
getting ready to move up in school, my mom was like,
we should pick one of these two activities, and I
picked four h rather than going on farther with the
Girl Scouts. But anyway, that was probably smarter than what
I did, which was always just add more activities, just
like I do is an adult. Yeah, my mom was
(01:29):
the person who was responsible for all of the driving
when it came to these kinds of activities. So I
think this was largely my mom wanting one less thing
to have to ship us all the way from way
out in the country to slightly less far out in
the country. Anyway, we're having this conversation because today we
have the extremely frequent listener request of Juliette Gordon Lowe,
(01:51):
who was the founder of the Girl Scouts to the
United States of America. And when I say a frequent
listener request, this is just from the last couple of
years of email and our Twitter mentions, and it has
come from Becky, Camille, Sarah, Katie, Anna, Alison, Lindsay, Nicola
and Amy and I know, farther back in the world
of things we can no longer really search easily, there
(02:13):
are other people who have asked for us to talk
about her. Aside from the fact that so many people
have asked us to talk about juliet Gordon Lowe, really
a lot of things about her life surprised me and
are very different from what I imagined her life to
be like before getting into this. If the only pictures
of her you have seen are the ones from later
in her life in her Scout uniform, she looks like
(02:34):
an almost totally different person from her pictures from her youth.
So I was very intrigued by all that. Juliette Gordon
Lowe was born Juliette McGill Kinzie Gordon on October thirty one,
eighteen sixty. She was nicknamed Daisy, and that's still the
name that she's known by in much of the world
of Girl Scouts, as well as by some of her biographers.
(02:55):
H and her parents were William Washington Gordon the second
and Eleanor Kinsey Gordon, who is known as Nellie. Juliette
was the second of six children. Her siblings were Eleanor, Alice, William, Mabel,
and Arthur. The family were committed Episcopalians who attended Christ
Church in Savannah, Georgia. The gardens were a really good
(03:16):
example of how one family could have complicated loyalties during
the U. S Civil War. William's family had been in
Georgia for generations, and part of their wealth came from
the cotton industry, so in addition to having an enslaved
workforce at the Gordon home, their income was coming from
enslaved labor. But then Nellie's family conversely went all the
(03:37):
way back to the founders of Chicago, Illinois, and in
general they were opposed to slavery, and some of them
were dedicated abolitionists. So in very broad strokes, Nellie's and
William's families were on opposite sides of the war. The
men in Nellie's family served in the US military, while
Williams served to the Confederacy, But at the same time
(03:57):
it was more complicated than that. Nellie gradually came to
believe that the war was necessary for Southern independence, and
that Southern independence itself was necessary. But even then, after
Savannah surrendered, she entertained people like US General William too
come to sherman at the family home. Juliette, of course,
is only six months old when the war started, so
(04:19):
she was too young to really understand what was going
on for most of it as she became a toddler,
though she was just fiercely loyal to her father and
sure that whatever he was doing was the right thing.
Nellie Gordon and the children went to Chicago for the
last few months of the war, and by the time
they arrived the whole family was malnourished. Juliette was also
(04:40):
extremely sick with what her mother described as brain fever,
and this was kind of a catch all term that
included serious illnesses like meningitis and encephalitis. Juliette eventually recovered
from this illness, but she was chronically ill for most
of her life. She contracted malaria sometime in her youth,
and she was prone to earaches and ear infections that
(05:01):
could cause her to temporarily lose summer all of her hearing.
These ear infections and her malaria tended to recur anytime
she was exhausted or stressed or sick with something else,
and she was also prone to abscesses, including in her ears,
and then later on in her life, she developed gout.
Once the Civil War was over, the Gordon's returned to Savannah,
and from that point overall Juliette had a happy childhood.
(05:25):
The family had to adjust to a new economy, one
that did not rely on enslaved labor, but Juliette was
not really conscious of this shift. She was accident prone
and eccentric, which led her family to start calling her
crazy Daisy. Her eccentricity also carried over to her written correspondence,
which tended to have so many spelling mistakes that historians
(05:46):
have speculated that she actually had a learning disability. And
there are scans of a lot of her letters online,
and in addition to there being a lot of mistakes,
there is a lot of talk about the mistakes and
how many there are. She also had a very kind
and generous heart. She and her friends like to put
on plays and sell tickets to them to raise money
for charities, including some that were set out to help
(06:06):
Native Americans. One of her favorite plays to stage was
about Mary, Queen of Scott's. Another of her childhood projects
included a short lived club called Helping Hands, which was
meant to help people who were less fortunate than they were,
but this club had to be disbanded during an epidemic
of yellow fever. You could describe some of her childhood
work as it's the thought that counts. Some of Juliet's
(06:29):
family called Helping Hands helpless hands because, for example, they
wanted to make clothes to donate to a family in need,
but they really didn't know how to do that, so
the results of their labors were not really wearable. Ideas.
Yeah they were. They were trying to make clothes for people,
and they didn't They didn't really know how to sew.
Starting when she was twelve, Juliette was educated in a
(06:50):
series of boarding schools, two of them in Virginia, one
in New Jersey, and then a French finishing school called
Mademoiselle Charbonnier in New York City. She made several very
close friends in these schools, including Abby Lippett and Mary
Gail Carter, who were her very best friends for the
rest of her life. She also studied art in New York,
including sculpture and painting, and she became very good at
(07:13):
painting onto China. In eighty tragedy struck the Gordon family.
Juliette's seventeen year old sister, Alice died of scarlet fever.
The entire family was grief stricken. Juliet's older sister, Eleanor
was away in Europe, so since Juliette was then the
oldest daughter at home, she had to keep things running
while her mother was consumed with grief. Juliette also tried
(07:36):
to keep her chin up and suthe the rest of
the family's heartbreak that on its own would have just
been a huge load to try to shoulder, but to
make things even harder, Juliette's mother interpreted her sort of
soldiering on as evidence that she wasn't all that sad
about her sister. Nellie accused Juliette of being selfish and shallow,
and Juliette knew that, in her own words quote, there
(07:59):
is more than one kind of sorrow, and that born
in silence is not less genuine because it is not
always seen. But Juliett also did worry that maybe her
sister Alice had died thinking that she didn't love her.
I feel like this whole thing is like evidence of
how grief can just mess with people, like, oh yeah,
I'm sure her mom also was seeing that through a
veil of her own grief and like did not have
(08:21):
the magnanimity of heart available to be like, oh no,
this is just how she's doing it, um yea. And
they had they sort of butted heads a lot for
for pretty much all of of Juliette's life. They had
personalities that conflicted with each other a lot of times
and in ways that could just come off as seeming
(08:42):
like they were angry at each other, but it was
really more like they just had different ways of approaching
the world, the misunderstandings of family. But in the midst
of all of this emotional turmoil, Juliette became acquainted with
William mackay Lowe. His family had previously been the Gordon's
neighbors in Savannah, but they had moved to England in
eighteen sixty seven. Because Juliet's father, brother, and now love
(09:05):
interest were all named William, h We're gonna call this
William by his nickname of Billow, just to try to
simplify a little bit, especially because we're going to get
to parts where multiple Williams are in the same room.
Below was very handsome, and he listened to all of
Juliette's grief about her sister and her frustrations with her
relationship with her mother. Juliette compared these conversations with him
(09:29):
to her most intimate friendships with her girlfriends in boarding school.
Less than three months after Alice's death, Juliette was deeply
in love with Billow, and she was also ashamed of
those feelings because she thought that she should really still
be mourning her sister and not finding joy with a
young man. On top of that, she knew that her
(09:49):
family was not going to approve of this match. The
Gordons were very well off, but they also valued hard work,
and Billow did not. He was set to inherit a
massive fortune when his father died, and he had no
plans to work at all, and Billow's family wouldn't have
approved of juliet either. Billow's father had made it clear
that he did not want his son to marry an
(10:11):
American or Mary during his own lifetime at all. So
Juliette and Billow courted in secret. They wrote to each
other after Billow went back to England, but eventually he
stopped writing to her, and at first juliet I just
thought something must have gotten misdirected or lost in the mail,
But as time went on with still no more letters,
she became determined to go see him and find out
(10:34):
what was going on. To that end, in two juliet
convinced her parents to let her take a tour of Europe,
as her older sister had done, but really she was
on a secret mission to find Billow and get him
to answer for his behavior. And we're going to talk
about all of that after we first pause for a
little sponsor break. So, as we said earlier, the Gordons
(11:03):
and the Lowe's had been neighbors back in Savannah. They
were family friends, so it was reasonable for juliet to
go call on Billow's sisters while she was in England.
She didn't do that. She paid them a visit, she
did not tell them why she was really there. It
turned out that Billow was not home that day, but
Juliette did manage to take a look around the house
and find his room. His mirror was covered with letters
(11:27):
and sketches that she had sent to him, but not
from anything from her more recent correspondence. She concluded that
Billow's father had discovered their letters and was keeping her
mail from him. Juliette went on her tour of the
European continent, but she was driven to distraction by the
thought of seeing Billow the whole time. She finally resigned
(11:48):
herself to the idea that it just wasn't going to happen.
Shortly before she returned home, she sent him a telegram
that said goodbye. I sail on the Gala. But then
and a drum add a turn of events. Just before
the ship set sail, one of the crew brought her
a telegram of her own, and it was from Billow,
who revealed that he had been looking for her as well.
(12:10):
This is such a good movie moment, and it did
lift Juliette's spirits, but not for long. She decided that
a relationship would Billow just could not work out. Both
of their families objected, and on top of that, Billow
was going to spend the next few years studying at Oxford. Juliette, though,
was I mean. She was an available, attractive, lovely young woman,
and on the way home she caught the eye of
(12:31):
another passenger on the ship. This was a captain who
fell for her completely, but as soon as she realized
that he was serious about her, Juliette rejected him because
if she could not have Billow, she did not want anyone.
She had made her formal debut into society, and after
getting home again, she received other proposals as well, and
she turned all of them down. Two years later, one
(12:54):
of Juliette's sisters got married and that brought all of
her feelings about Billow back to the surface. She came
up with another reason to go abroad, this time to
visit her school friend Mary, but once again Juliet's real
motive was to try to see Billow. She left in
May of eighty four, two years after deciding to give
Billow up and four years after having met him in
(13:15):
the first place. Even though she was there to visit Mary,
Juliette accepted an invitation to stay with the Low sisters,
and of course this was because she hoped it would
let her run into their brother. This time, this worked.
Juliette and Billow confess their loved each other in person,
and then once again they decided, because of all those
reasons from two years ago that still existed, not to
(13:37):
pursue it. Juliette reunited with Mary's family in Scotland, and
they were a little annoyed to learn what had been
going on with that visit to the Lows, And before
she went back to the United States, Juliette paid the
Lows yet another visit. While she was there, she and
Below saw one another again, and then the two of
them decided, in spite of all of those law tical reasons,
(14:00):
that they had previously decided against it to actually try
to be together. About six months later, in January, the
ear pain that had been troubling Juliette off and on
for much of her life became really acute. She went
to a specialist who tried a procedure involving silver nitrate,
and there were some complications, and that led to even
(14:21):
more pain and the loss of most of her hearing.
In that year. Billow was visiting at the time, and
he was there for Juliette as she went through a
long series of procedures and visits to specialists, all to
try to repair the damage to her ear, and this
was what led Juliette's father, William to alter his opinion
about whether Billow was right for his daughter. Juliette was
(14:43):
in pain and felt terrible about this whole situation, not
just because of her health, but also because a lot
of blame was being thrown around about exactly whose fault
this situation was. Billow boosted her spirits and William reluctantly
he agreed to give the couple his blessing williams us
and came with some conditions, though Billow had to live
(15:03):
within his financial means. The couple needed to spend at
least six months of each year in Savannah, and Billow's father, Andrew,
had to agree that Billow would continue to have his
financial support. There was just no way that William was
going to allow his daughter to get married if there
was a chance that her husband might wind up cut
off from his inheritance for some reason, which would have
(15:24):
left him with no way of supporting her. Finally, William
and Andrew finished their negotiation for the marriage, which included
a year long engagement starting when Billow headed back to
England in February of But what none of the Gordons
really knew at this point was that Billow's reputation back
in London would have been considered scandalous. In Savannah, he
(15:47):
ran in the same circles as Edward Albert, also known
as Bertie, Prince of Wales, whose life was full of
affairs and scandals. The Gordons and their friends all knew
about the reputation of the Prince of Wales, but they
didn't know that Billow was connected to that same circle
and was regarded in kind of the same way. They
got a glimpse of it during the engagement, though, when
(16:09):
Billow placed a bet on a horse race that was
so big that it was covered in the press, the
Gordons were livid, and Juliette tried to downplay the bet
as something that he had placed on behalf of several
other people and not something that was entirely his own money. Then,
on June six, Billow's father died, he came into his
(16:29):
whole inheritance. Juliette and Billow decided not to put off
the wedding in light of Andrew's death, and they got
married on December six. After the wedding, as guests were
showering the couple with rice, Juliette got a grain of
rice stuck in her ear, that same ear that had
gone through all of those complications the year before. After
(16:50):
the honeymoon, when she hadn't been able to dislodge it,
Juliette went to the doctor to try to have the
rice removed, and all of this damaged her ear even further,
and she lost almost all of her hearing in it.
She also contracted bronchitis and spent most of the first
months of her marriage too sick to even climb the
stairs in their home in early May of eight seven,
(17:11):
Juliette started losing the hearing in her other ear as well.
She consulted a doctor who suggested that it was a
sympathetic reaction to her previous hearing loss. She saw a
number of specialists and tried different treatments over the rest
of her life, but none of them ever restored her hearing.
It was something that sometimes she would improve as maybe
her ear drum healed up a little, but then a
(17:33):
lot of times it would get worse again. Her hearing
loss didn't affect her speech, but she couldn't always understand
people when they were speaking to her. Juliette had a
really hard time adjusting to being a gentleman's wife. At first,
they didn't have a permanent home of their own, and
they were releasing large estates in England and Scotland. Billow
finally bought a fifty five acre estate in Warwickshire in
(17:55):
eighteen eighty nine, which they expanded to include twenty bedrooms
huge stables. Juliette really loved finally having a permanent place
of her own. It also made it easier for her
to be a little philanthropic. Billow was really opposed to
the idea of her dedicating herself to philanthropy full time.
He seemed to think that it would lead her to
(18:17):
judge his life of idleness, so she tended to do
smaller things like visiting people in need and donating vegetables
and flowers from their gardens. Juliette really wanted to be useful, though,
and she finally got the chance to do that during
the Spanish American War. Her mother back during the Civil
War had hated being separated from her father, so Nellie
(18:39):
had made the decision that she would accompany William to
Florida while where he was going to be serving in
the military, and she was going to start a convalescent
home for soldiers there. Juliette traveled back to the United States.
She joined her mother in Florida, and together they cared
for men who were recovering from illnesses like malaria, measles,
and typhoid. Juliette loved having me full work to do,
(19:01):
and when her father was transferred and Nelly planned to
go with him, Juliett volunteered to stay behind and continue
on with the convalescent home. But then the war ended
in August and that home was closed down. Not long
after this, Juliette had another major change in her life,
and we will get to that after another quick sponsor break.
(19:28):
Juliet's marriage to Billow was really struggling. By the turn
of the twentieth century. Juliette had surgery to remove abscesses
and cists from her abdomen, and this may have affected
her reproductive system as well. Regardless of whether that was
a factor, she and Billow did not have any children,
and Juliet really blamed herself about this, and she felt
(19:48):
a lot of shame about it. I mean, there's still
some stigma about people who want to have children and
can't today. This was worse when she was living and
she she had felt ashamed of the fact that she
had not had any children. As their marriage went on,
Billow spent more and more time away from home, and
his expenses became really extravagant, including spending a lot on
(20:11):
betting and on race horses. Billow also became involved with
another woman named Anna Bridges Bateman, and it's not clear
exactly when that relationship started, but Juliette hosted Anna at
their home at least once, not knowing that she and
Billow were having an affair. Anna also stayed in their
home after Juliette did know about that affair, but Juliette
(20:32):
felt like she couldn't really say anything about it. By
nineteen o one, Juliette was talking about pursuing a divorce,
and this was something that English law made very difficult.
The most logical option was to seek a divorce on
the grounds of infidelity. It was clearly what was going on,
but she didn't really want to do this because it
meant publicizing to the world that her husband had an affair,
(20:55):
and Billow did not want her to do it either,
because it would have meant publicizing to the war world
who he was having an affair with. In nineteen o two,
they separated, and by that fall Juliett was realizing that
she was happier without Billow than she had been with him,
and Juliette started visiting family and friends and traveling more.
After a while, Juliette started hearing rumors that Below was
(21:17):
drinking heavily and that his health was increasingly poor. He
died on June n o five, at which point he
and Juliette were still separated but not divorced. He had
requested for Anna to handle his funeral arrangements, which the
family agreed to, and he had also rewritten his will,
leaving almost everything to Anna, including what was supposed to
(21:40):
be Juliette's annual allowance. With the help of bellow sisters,
Juliette successfully contested the will. Anna still got a sizeable inheritance,
but Juliette got a lovesome and annuity and the Low's
house in Savannah. It was enough for her to be comfortable.
Less than a year later, an old family friend named
(22:00):
Archie Hunter proposed to her, but she turned him down,
describing herself as too old and deaf to try again,
especially since she was not in love with him. She
had a whole lot of like, I just don't love
that guy. He seems to be into me, but I'm
not that into him. For the next several years after
her estranged husband's death, Juliette traveled the world. She visited relatives,
(22:22):
and she did some charitable work, and in a lot
of ways she was enjoying herself, but she still wanted
something to do. As always, she wanted to be useful,
but she couldn't really find a cause that really just
captured her heart. This lack of direction changed basically overnight
when she met General Sir Robert Baden Powell in nineteen eleven.
(22:44):
Biden Powell was regarded as a war hero for his
leadership during the Siege of Mafficking in the Boer Wars.
He was also the founder of the Boy Scouts. I
have that siege on my list for a potential future
episode because of course it is a lot more complicated
than that. Uh, And Biden Powell is not universally regarded
(23:04):
as a hero depending on who you're talking to, But
we've also had just a lot of nineteenth and twentieth
century lately, so maybe on like a little farther down
the road. So uh is being the founder of the
Boy Scouts makes a sound as though founding the Boy
Scouts was something he intentionally set out to do, but
really it was almost an accident. During his career with
(23:26):
the British Army, Biden Powell wrote a couple of books
about scouting. They were meant to teach military men about
reconnaissance and about being a soldier. And then when he
got back to Britain after serving in the Boer Wars,
he was surprised to discover that groups of boys had
been using these books to organize themselves into little scouting patrols,
(23:47):
often with their own names for the patrol and their
own uniforms. At the time, British society was concerned about
whether boys and young men were self reliant enough, and
whether British citizens were adequately prepared from a mill terry perspective,
so people started calling for Baden Powell to formalize these patrols,
and the result of that was the Boy Scouts. And
(24:09):
of course there were girls who were interested in scouting
as well, and some girls had formed their own patrols
already or had tried to join in with the boys.
But Biden Powell and others thought that it was best
to separate these groups by gender, so he enlisted his
sister Agnes to start the corresponding girl Guides. When Juliette
Gordon Lowe met Robert Baden Powell and learned about the
(24:30):
Scouting movement, that was it. At the age of fifty one,
low had found her life's work. Scouting combined so many
traits that had been central to her life and her worldview.
She had always wanted to be helpful. She had a
strong sense of civic duty. She loved the outdoors, including
hiking and hunting. Some of the most important relationships in
(24:53):
her life were friendships with other girls now women, that
she had made when she was young. Her religious faith,
and her compassion, and her idea that childhood should be
fun and happy. It was all right there in the
Scouting movement. She and Biden Powell began working together within
the Scouting movement in Britain. In nineteen eleven, Low helped
(25:13):
established two Girl Guy patrols in Scotland and one in England.
Then in nineteen twelve, she and Biden Powell traveled across
the Atlantic to bring the Scouting movement to the United States.
It's clear that there was an attraction between the two
of them, and, according to some accounts, at one point,
while they were working together in the UK, he proposed
(25:33):
to her, But on that voyage to New York, Biden
Powell became secretly engaged to another passenger named Alive st
Clair Solmes. We don't really know how Low felt about this.
She found out along with the rest of the world,
when it was formally announced more than six months later.
Once she got back to Savannah, Low called her cousin
Nina Anderson Pape and said, come right over, I've got
(25:57):
something for the girls of Savannah and all America, and
we're going to start it tonight. And then they got
to work establishing Savannah's first Girl Guide's patrol. And although
a lot of things about this patrol have become part
of Girl Scout lore, including exactly when they had their
first meeting, who their first members were, and that one
of Juliette's nieces was the first to be enrolled, the
(26:19):
documentation of those first few months is pretty fuzzy. Regardless.
Though there were several Girl Guide patrols in Savannah, including
one at the Savannah Female Orphan Asylum, Low particularly wanted
the Girl Scouts to be a positive force in the
lives of girls who were living in poverty, so she
made a special effort to make sure that patrols were
established for them and that participating was affordable. Those first
(26:42):
patrols in Savannah often included Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish girls together,
but in general the patrols were separated by social class.
Organizers worried that upper class parents would prohibit their daughters
from participating if less affluent girls were included in the
same patrol, and in Savannah they were also segregated by race.
(27:03):
Separate patrols were established for African American girls, including one
that was led by one of the Gordon family's household staff.
Juliette's family was happy to see that she had found
something to occupy herself and that it was clearly making
her so happy, But at the same time they also
remembered her being quote crazy Daisy and the group that
(27:24):
they nicknamed the Helpless Hands, So they really thought Juliette
might make a mess of this whole thing or just
lose interest, but the opposite happened. Girl Guides continued to
grow in n Juliette started contacting the leaders of similar
organizations for girls, encouraging them to become part of the
Girl Guides. It was clear that only one organization could
(27:46):
be viewed as the sister organization to the Boy Scouts,
and Juliette wanted that to be the Girl Guides, so
she tried to get the Girl Pioneers, the Campfire Girls,
and other organizations to join her. This was not altogether successful,
and sometimes it became outright acrimonious. Low had an ongoing
dispute with Lynda Beard, who had established the Girl Pioneers
(28:09):
in nineteen twelve, and Clara Elicitor Lane had also formed
a group called the Girl Scouts of America in Chicago,
and she went on to accused low of stealing her
idea and the name for it, but Juliette Gordon Lowe persisted.
She carried on after her father died in nineteen twelve,
after she learned about Robert Baden Powell's secret engagement, and
(28:30):
after other women she recruited to help moved on to
different things. She also traveled back and forth between the
US and the UK, helping the movement in Europe and
bringing new ideas and techniques back to the US with her.
She also focused on taking this movement national in the
United States, and to that end, she changed the name
from Girl Guides to Girl Scouts, which is something a
(28:51):
lot of people did not want her to do at all,
including Robert Baden Powell. She did, though, eventually convinced him
to approve of the cha change. Bo also established a
national headquarters for the Girl Scouts in Washington, d C.
And it started growing into a formal organization with a
professional paid staff. In nineteen thirteen, the first US specific
(29:13):
Girl Scout handbook was published, called How Girls Can Help
Their Country. As all of this was going on, Low
was continuing to struggle with her health. All of the
same illnesses and conditions that have been part of her
life so far continued to be present. She also underwent
radium treatment for her gout in the nineteen teens and
experienced ongoing back pain from an injury. None of this
(29:37):
stopped her work, though. She kept crossing the Atlantic and
recruiting leaders and raising money and evangelizing about the Scouting movement.
By nineteen fourteen, it was essentially a full time job.
In nineteen fifteen, not directly connected to scouting, Low was
awarded US Patent one one two to five Liquid Container
(29:58):
for use with garbage cans or the which was basically
a folding pattern for a sheet of waterproof paper that
could be used in conjunction with a garbage can to
hold liquid and disposed of along with its contents. She
was also awarded a design patent for the trefoil design
of the first Girl Scout badge. I guess this could
really be tangentially connected to scouting because it reminds me
(30:20):
of the kinds of trash cans we would have at camp.
Lowe's mother died in February of nineteen seventeen, and by
then World War One had been going on for nearly
three years, and Girl Scouts had been flourishing as groups
of girls dedicated themselves to the war effort. They were
raising money and rolling bandages and working with the Red
(30:40):
Cross and generally trying to be of service. There were,
of course, plenty of administrative headaches and growing pains throughout
all of this, and there had been concerns that Scouting
was going to cause girls to become too masculine or
too headstrong. But in general, by the end of World
War One, the Girl Scouts were recognizable all across the
US and generally were associated with being helpful, kind and respectful.
(31:05):
And then by the nineteen twenties people had started to
see Girl Scouts as an alternative to the flapper lifestyle.
Biographer Stacy Cordery described it as quote the antidote to flappers.
Scouting advocates also viewed the movement as a force for
world peace because children around the world were participating in
an organization that had a focus on duty and service
(31:25):
and common goals no matter what location they were in.
All of this helped to keep the organization going when
those immediate wartime needs were over. Throughout all of this,
the Girl Scout Organization occupied an interesting place in terms
of social issues. Often it tried to remain politically neutral.
For example, the organization did not take a formal position
(31:47):
on the issue of women's suffrage, but at the same time,
in some ways it was more progressive than other similar
organizations when many organizations banned black members in any capacity.
Some of the first patrols in the North were integrated,
and troops for African American girls existed in the South
almost from the beginning. The first troop for Native American
(32:09):
girls was established in nineteen eighteen, although there were almost
certainly Native girls involved in scouting before that. In ninety two,
the first Latina group was established in Houston, Texas, and
in nineteen twenty three, at a time when disability was
far more visibly stigmatized than it is in the US today,
the organization decided that Scouts with disabilities would be eligible
(32:30):
to earn the Golden Eaglet, which was its highest honor,
and this was something that Lowe argued for strenuously. As
she was making those arguments, Juliette Gordon Lowe was also
being treated for breast cancer, which may have been connected
to her earlier radium treatments. By this point, she had
stepped down as president of the Girl Scouts, taking the
(32:51):
role of founder and focusing on expanding scouting internationally. She
told almost no one about her illness, and she continued
working even as she got er and developed lead poisoning
because of one of her treatments. Juliette Gordon Lowe continued
to work for the international Scouting movement until her death
on January seventeenth, ninety seven, at the age of sixty six.
(33:13):
By that point, the Girl Scouts had a hundred and
sixty eight thousand members and had held national and international
conferences and established camps for girls. The Girl Scouts had
moved from homemade uniforms that varied from one group to
another to standard uniforms that could be purchased, and troops
had also started selling cookies to raise money. Troops had
(33:34):
been established all across the United States, including Alaska and Hawaii,
which weren't states yet, and in Puerto Rico. Juliette Gordon
Lowe is one of only three Americans to be awarded
the Silver Fish, which is the highest honor in Girl Guides.
She earned that award in nineteen nineteen, and honors and
awards have continued after her death. In ninety four, a
(33:55):
US Liberty ship was named the S. S. Juliette low
Juliette Orton Lowe has also been commemorated on a stamp,
and had schools named after her, and been inducted into
the National Women's Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls. Her
birthplace was registered as a National Historical Landmark in nineteen
sixty five, and a federal building complex was named after
(34:16):
her in nineteen eighty three. In twelve, she was posthumously
awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Then Today, of course,
the Girl Scouts of the United States America still exists.
There are two point five million members, including about seven
hundred and fifty thousand adult members and leaders. And man,
those cookies and the cookies, I I'm not gonna lie. Um.
(34:41):
I did not imagine that somebody who started an organization
that has so much focus on being self reliant and
supporting other girls would have spent so much of her
young adult life Chason after a boy like that just
surprised me a little, shouldn't though I might have done
(35:03):
the same thing if I had been in her place. Yeah, totally.
I mean I was like one of those kids that
was raised by a dad who was very much like
from the time I was little, like you gotta take
care of yourself all the time. But I still would have,
you know, chased after a boy. I imagine I wish
it had been a boy that was more of her affection.
(35:24):
The heart wants what it wants, Tracy. Yeah, do you
have a little bit of listener mail. Yeah, this is
from Janine and it's um it's related to this podcast,
which just has a completely, uh completely coincidental connection to
another recent podcast. So Janine says, I'm quite behind on
your podcast. So I just listened to the episode from
back in February on Mary Winston Jackson and was delighted
(35:48):
to hear she was a Girl Scout leader. I'm also
a Girl Scout leader and was just so excited and
moved to hear about her work mentoring girls and especially
in integrating the councils in her area. I was not
surprised us that she continued to mentor young people throughout
her life. I think one of the most rewarding parts
of being a Girl Scout leader is the opportunity to
mentor girls and young women, and I think Jackson would
(36:09):
have agreed with me. I just talked to my Daisy
Troop about courageous and strong women this week as we
reviewed the courageous and strong part of the Girl Scout Law.
I was sadly unfamiliar with Mary Winston Jackson before listening
to your episode, so she did not feature in the discussion,
but you can bet she will next time we talk
about it. Thanks so much for the work you do.
My degrees are in history and related subjects, and I
(36:31):
appreciate the research you put into the show and the
sourceless to attach at the end. Keep up the good work, Janine.
And then Janine also sent us cat pictures, which we
always appreciate. Her cats are a tabby named Walnut and
a black wood named Hildegard, of course, named for Hildegard
von Bingen. I was delighted by all of that and
delighted to see these cats, So thank you, Janine. Uh
(36:55):
if you would like to write to us about this
or any other podcast where history podcast and How Stuff
Works dot com, and then you can find us all
over social media at miss in History. That is where
you will find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram. You
can come to our website, which is missed in History
dot com, where you will find show notes for all
the episodes Holly and I have worked on together, a
searchable archive of every episode ever, and that's where we
(37:18):
will have the information about any upcoming shows that we
have out in the world. You can also subscribe to
our show on Apple, podcast, to the iHeart radio app,
and wherever else you get podcasts. Stuffy miss in History
Class is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works.
(37:38):
For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart
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Tracy Wilson
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