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Julette Low was born in Savannah, Georgia on October 31, 1860. She was the second of six children in her family (three sisters and two brothers). The house where she lived is now a national center.
When she was young, she went to a boarding school in Virginia and when she was older; she went to a French school in New York City. She loved the arts. She designed her own clothes, painted china and often performed skits and drama with her friends.
But she was also a tomboy; rough housing with her brothers, getting her hair braided with taffy, and once even cementing her finger to a soap dish! Some people called her an eccentric, but she thought she just had an original "take" on things.
She married William Low when she was 26 years old, in part because that's what women did in her day. They were raised to be wives and mothers. It was a society marriage, filled with travel, fox hunts, and entertainment. Eventually they grew apart. She was interested in learning sculpture, woodcarving, forging and blacksmithing. He was interested in being waited on hand and foot. It probably would have ended in divorce, but William died before things were finalized.
She met a lot of different people though out her life: General Sherman, Rudyard Kipling, and various members of royalty. The most influential ones though were Sir Baden-Powell and his sister Agnes.
Julette met them in1911 when she was in Scotland, and they remained close friends for the next 15 years. Robert started the Boy Scouts in England, and it seemed such a purposeful activity that girls were interested in it too. And so they started the Girl Guides. Julette ran her own Girl Guide "troop" the year she was in Scotland.
When she came back to America, she called her cousin and told her that she had "...something for the girls of Savannah, and all America, and all the world.." and that they had to get started on it right away.
Julette had fifteen years to watch her program grow. What started out as a group of girls meeting to study nature or learn to play basketball in her backyard, grew quickly. In 1913, she helped to write the first Girl Scout Handbook.
It wasn't easy, people seemed convinced that this would be one more thing she started and then lost interest in and money was also a concern. At one point she even sold her pearls to finance the organization.
But she never had any doubts that it would be successful. After all, she knew the girls could do anything they set their minds to. In fact, when America entered into world War 1, she wrote to President Wilson and offered him the Girl Scouts' services. Girls went to help out the Red Cross, planted victory gardens, and helped to sell millions of war bonds.
In January 1927, Julette lost her battle to cancer. She had been fighting it for the last few years, and had kept it a secret from all but her closest friends. She found that she had to spend less and less time actually running the Girl Scouts, and more time creating an organizational structure that would ensure that the movement didn't die with her. She succeeded. In 1927 there were 167,925 girl Scouts and now there's almost 3.5 million girls and adults!
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