Juliette Gordon Low and the First Meeting

Juliette Gordon Low was fifty-one years old on March twelfth, nineteen twelve, when she gathered eighteen girls in a carriage house behind her family home on Oglethorpe Avenue in Savannah for the first meeting of what she was calling the Girl Scouts. She had met Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scout movement, in England, and had come home convinced that American girls needed an equivalent organization, something that would take them outdoors, teach them practical skills, and treat them as capable of civic life rather than purely domestic preparation.

Low had become deaf by the time she started the organization. She had been experiencing hearing loss for years, and a wedding ceremony in which a piece of rice thrown by guests lodged in her ear canal and caused an infection that she treated incorrectly had accelerated it considerably. She ran the organization through the nineteen tens in a state of substantial hearing impairment, communicating through lip-reading and force of personality in roughly equal measure.

She sold her pearl necklace to fund the organization's early operations. The pearl necklace story has the quality of a legend because it actually happened. The organization she started with eighteen girls in a carriage house grew to more than three million members at its peak, though membership has fallen to roughly one million girls today in the United States alone. The carriage house is gone. The family home where she was born is preserved as the Juliette Gordon Low Birthplace, a national historic site managed by the Girl Scouts of the United States of America, the only national program site they operate outside of their New York headquarters.