Crazy Daisy and the Girls Scouts

Today marks the 100^th anniversary of the Girls Scouts, originally called American Girl Guides and its British equivalent, Girl Guides.  This blog is not to restate the obvious or to copy/paste what may be printed on an international level in today’s news. However, when reading the Houston Chronicle article by Maggie Galehouse a few points jumped off the page. Let’s start with the originators name: Juliette Daisy Gordon Low.

Juliette – in French it means soft haired, in Latin Down-bearded youth (still soft).  One of the pictures in the paper is of a soft featured appearance of a lady, complete with a hat. (I love hats and have close to ten of them). Looks can be deceiving when a woman is on a mission of any kind.

Daisy – English meaning Days Eye or Eye of the Day, the flower. The first picture in the article is of that first group of young ladies and judging by the shadows was near noon.  All are uniformed, saluting the day AND the next steps in their paths.

Low – her married name and a marriage which brought little comfort.  Her husband was an adulterer and her hearing was forever impaired by a grain of rice which lodged itself in her ear on her wedding day resulting in chronic ear infections.  Her husband was a pain and the wedding rice caused pain.

Juliette Daisy Gordon Low was 51 years old when she founded the first troop of “Girl Scouts of the USA” in Savannah, Georgia.  

This American pioneer southern girl did well for all of us while no longer young by the standards of that time, in a more than troubled marriage, was hearing impaired which is a disability by today’s standards, was called “Crazy Daisy” because she liked to experience fun as a youth, and the purpose behind her forming of the Girl Scouts was to empower girls from all walks of life whether “factory girls, working-class girls, wealthy girls, immigrant girls, everybody”(as quoted from Houston Chronicle 3/12/2102). 

Some of my favorite facts in the article are these:  53% of women business owners are former Girl Scouts, ten of the 17 women serving in the US Senate are Girl Scouts and 2.3 million girls in the Girls Scouts of the USA today.

Keep in mind this was a full eight years before we were granted the right to vote on August 26, 1920 through the passing of the 19^th Amendment.  I would surely like to know how the experience of being the first group of Girl Scouts affected the decisions/goals set for their adult life and how they may have participated, if at all, in the women’s suffrage movement. 

I lived the life of a Girl Scout even though not one officially.  Oh well, another story for another time ….