Juliette Magill Kinzie Gordon Low, known throughout her life as Daisy, was the founder of the Girl Scouts of the United States of America. She was born in Savannah, Georgia, on October 31, 1860, the second of six children of William Washington Gordon II and Eleanor Lytle Kinzie Gordon. Her father came from a prominent Savannah family connected with law, commerce, and public life; her mother belonged to a Chicago family with its own history of writing and frontier experience. The Civil War began within months of her birth. Her father served with Confederate forces, while her mother’s relatives were on the Union side, so the household felt the divided loyalties of the era from the start. Daisy grew up in the family home on Lafayette Square, later preserved as the Juliette Gordon Low Birthplace, and was raised with the expectations of a Southern upper-class girl, yet also with unusual independence of mind.
As a child she was energetic, inventive, and often unconventional. Family stories describe her painting, writing, keeping animals, and organizing games with a flair that later served her as an organizer of girls. She was educated in Savannah and then at boarding schools, including schools in Virginia and New York, and she spent time in the cultural circles of both the South and the North. An ear infection and subsequent treatments left her with severe hearing loss in one ear while she was still young. A later accident involving a grain of rice thrown at her wedding further damaged the other ear, so that for much of her adult life she was nearly deaf. She learned to manage conversation by lip-reading and by refusing to treat the impairment as a barrier. That determination became part of her public character.
In 1886 she married William Mackay Low, a wealthy Savannah native who lived much of the year in England and Scotland. The couple divided their time between Britain and the United States. The marriage was unhappy. William Low was often absent, and the relationship deteriorated amid reports of his affairs and disputes over money and property. They had no children. When he died in 1905, Daisy was left a widow in her mid-forties, financially independent after a contested estate settlement, and free to redirect her energy. She continued to move between Savannah, London, and Scotland, painting, sculpting, and maintaining a wide circle of friends. Among those friends were Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scouts, and his sister Agnes Baden-Powell, who organized the Girl Guides in Britain.
Daisy met the Baden-Powells around 1911 and quickly took up their idea that young people could be trained in practical skills, outdoor competence, citizenship, and character. She formed a small Girl Guide company in Scotland and helped with groups in London. Convinced that American girls needed a similar organization, she returned to Savannah early in 1912. On March 12, 1912, she gathered the first American troop, initially called Girl Guides, in her hometown. The often-quoted telephone call to her cousin Nina Pape captured her style: she announced that she had something for the girls of Savannah, and of America, and of the world, and that they were going to start that night. The first members included relatives and local girls; the group was soon divided into patrols. Within a year the American name shifted from Girl Guides to Girl Scouts, distinguishing the movement while keeping its link to the international idea.
Low did not treat the Savannah troop as a private experiment. In 1913 she opened a national headquarters in Washington, D.C., later moved to New York, and oversaw the first American handbook, How Girls Can Help Their Country. She drafted early laws and promises adapted from the British model, emphasizing honor, loyalty, usefulness, cheerfulness, and service. She paid many of the early bills herself, recruited adult leaders among friends and relatives, and traveled constantly to start troops. By 1915 the movement was incorporated nationally as the Girl Scouts of the United States of America, and Low was elected its first president. Membership was still modest—reports from that period cite a few thousand registered members—but the structure of a national council and executive committee was in place. She insisted that the program reach beyond a single social class. Early Savannah troops included girls of different backgrounds, and she argued that girls with disabilities should have a place as well, a position shaped in part by her own deafness.
The program she built mixed camping, first aid, homemaking, citizenship, and vocational skills at a time when many Americans still expected girls to prepare only for domestic life. Badge work and outdoor activities gave participants a public claim to competence. During the First World War, Girl Scouts sold Liberty Bonds, grew food, and performed community service, which helped the organization gain respectability. Low represented the United States at the first international council of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts in 1919 and received the Silver Fish, a high British Guiding award. In 1920 she resigned the presidency, took the title of founder, and left day-to-day administration to others, including her niece Anne Hyde Choate. Her birthday, October 31, was designated Founder’s Day.
She did not retire from the work. She continued to speak, raise money, and promote international friendship among Guides and Scouts. In 1923 she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She kept the illness largely private and maintained a heavy schedule, including a final trip to England in 1926. She returned to Savannah after the New Year and died at her home on Lafayette Square on January 17, 1927, at the age of sixty-six. She was buried in Laurel Grove Cemetery beside her parents. Girl Scouts held memorial services, and friends later established the Juliette Low World Friendship Fund to support international projects.
Her legacy is institutional as much as personal. The organization she started grew from a single Savannah gathering into a national movement that has enrolled tens of millions of girls. Her birthplace became a historic site and National Historic Landmark. She has been honored on a United States postage stamp and, much later, on a commemorative quarter, and she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously in 2012. Historians note the limits of her world: she was a privileged white woman of the Jim Crow South, and the early Girl Scouts reflected the racial segregation of their time even as Low spoke of inclusion across class and ability. What remains distinctive is the practical wager she made in 1912—that girls should be trained to be useful, self-reliant, and publicly engaged, and that an organization built for that purpose could outlast its founder. The telephone call in Savannah was theatrical, but the decades of funding, handbooks, travel, and committee work that followed turned the gesture into a durable institution.