SOUTHERN WIDOW FOUNDS NATIONAL INSTITUTION

That Juliette Gordon Low founded the Girl Scouts — the most prominent girls’ organization in the world, with 50 million American alumnae and turning 100 years old on March 12 — was something of an improbability. Growing up, she was considered the ditziest of the three Gordon sisters, and her family nicknamed her “Crazy Daisy.” Low had no guiding philosophy or intellectual rationale around educating girls. She was not a suffragette or an activist of any kind. She was a 50-year-old widow with no children.

But Low was also the type of woman the Girl Scouts would try to shape for generations — brave, adventurous, independent — in an era when those values were not generally desired in the fairer sex.

Low was born in Savannah, Ga., on Oct. 31, 1860, daughter of a Confederate soldier and a mother whose family were among the early settlers of Chicago, making her a rare combination of Southern gentility and Western free-spiritedness. Low understood duty but didn’t mind flouting convention; she adored men in uniform but didn’t mind the idea of women in (scouting) uniform, either.
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