You know, food is always helpful when you are bringing kids together,” Cordery said. She gave them solid skills and fun and tea. “So she saw how her guiding experiences helped these girls to, she believed, a better future. Low had worked as a volunteer in settlement houses in England, and she e3ventually started a girl scout troop in Scotland, for poor girls. When he died, he left his fortune to his mistress. But he fell ill, and she felt she had to drop the divorce proceedings. Low had a mistress, and Juliette threatened to divorce him. Low married a young Savannah man with roots in England, Willie Low, but it was a difficult marriage. And all the glory to people around her were in these uniforms and I think that, like most children who are lucky enough to avoid the battle for it itself, she played games about war with her sisters and so forth,” Cordery said. “So her early years then were colored by the privations of war and the fact that her father was this, you know, larger than life romantic figure in this Confederate uniform. Her mother was from Chicago her father, a proud Georgian who fought in the Civil War for the Confederates. Born in 1860, her early life was affected by the civil war.

Low grew up in Savannah, Georgia, one of six children in a fairly wealthy family. On her wedding day, a piece of rice got lodged in her ear and caused further infection, worsening her condition even more. Low wasn’t born deaf she had been plagued by ear infections and problems her whole life, and in her teens, a doctor attempted a treatment involving silver nitrate, which severely worsened her condition. The book is titled “Juliette Gordon Low: The Remarkable Founder of the Girl Scouts.”Ĭordery was in the Brownies when she first learned about Low, and she was very impressed that Low had accomplished so much in spite of her disability (she was deaf). Historian Stacy Cordery has written a new biography about its creator. More than 50 million young women have been Girl Scouts at some point in their lives. Reprinted by arrangement with Viking, A member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., from Juliette Gordon Low: The Remarkable Founder of the Girl Scouts by Stacy A.

Juliette Gordon Low by Stacy A. Cordery