Bygone Badass Broads by Mackenzi Lee

Author:Mackenzi Lee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Abrams
Published: 2018-03-18T04:00:00+00:00

JULIETTE GORDON LOW

1860–1927, UNITED STATES

Founder of the Girl Scouts

Lord Robert Baden-Powell had a problem.

He had founded an organization called the Boy Scouts, which, from the name alone, you might have gathered was rather exclusionary of half the children of the world. All he wanted was to take young men into the woods and teach them how to make tents out of tarps and weave macramé from their struggling facial hair, but the problem was that girls were clamoring to join in, too. Young ladies were showing up at Boy Scout rallies in homemade uniforms and trying to sign up with fake names, and B-P knew something had to be done about it.

Luckily he was seated next to Juliette Gordon Low at a party. She was a fifty-something recent widow from Savannah, Georgia, and she was looking for a purpose in life and some girls to empower.

Called Daisy by her family and friends (and since she was a friend to all girls, I’m going to call her Daisy, too), she was born in the Confederate States during the American Civil War, but the family moved to Chicago when she was young. Daisy was a bright, curious, and accident-prone child whose youth was plagued by everything from the totally legit-sounding Victorian ailment brain fever, to two fingers broken so severely they almost had to be amputated and an ear infection that resulted in partial deafness. On her wedding day, she got a grain of rice lodged in her ear during the grain throwing part.

Their marriage was a fraught one—her husband was a drinker and a cheater. She spent most of their relationship splitting her time between his home country of England, where she had to bite her tongue and pretend to be happy, and her hometown of Georgia, where she would collapse on the shoulders of her friends under the stress of her failing marriage. As she wafted through upper-crust parties and tried to find fulfillment in charity work (which her husband was against, because he was a major jerk), it became clear to Daisy that she couldn’t stay married to this guy. The couple had just started discussing divorce when he died suddenly, leaving Daisy childless and alone in her fifties.

She had no idea what to do with her life.

This is when she met B-P, heard about his problem of plucky young girls looking for someone to teach them skills and confidence, and found her purpose.

Daisy threw herself immediately and enthusiastically into empowering the young women of America, turning them into glorious female warriors, queens of all that they survey. In 1912, shortly after that fateful networking opportunity with B-P, eighteen girls gathered in Daisy’s cousin’s schoolhouse in Savannah, and the Girl Scouts was born.

“I’VE GOT SOMETHING FOR THE GIRLS OF SAVANNAH, AND ALL OF AMERICA, AND ALL THE WORLD, AND WE’RE GOING TO START IT TONIGHT!”

From the start, Daisy wanted the Girl Scouts to be inclusive. No girl, no matter her race, background, or financial situation, would be turned away.

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