Book Review: Juliette Low, Girl Scout Founder
We see more hints of things to come when we discover that Juliette likes to do things that other girls don't, such as riding horses and writing plays and climbing cliffs. She also insists on being the woman president of a club that she and her friends start. (Her friend Randy is the man president.) The book does a good job of capturing the tension of Civil War and postwar America, at least in Georgia and Chicago, showing the reactions to momentous events through the eyes of Daisy and other children. And like other books in the series, it takes the reader through the young years of the subjects life and then ends with the reason the subject is famous. In this case, the jump is almost too abrupt. Daisy is thrilled to be asked to a dance as a teenager at the end of one chapter, then getting married to someone the reader has never met in the next chapter. And in the very same chapter, we discover that her husband has died some years ago and that Juliette Gordon Low (no longer Daisy) is living in Scotland! Still, it is important to include the story of how the Girl Scouts got started, and the author does well with that, recounting the meeting of Juliette Low and her friend Sir Robert Baden-Powell, who had started the Boy Scouts in England. When he had described all the outdoor things that his boys were doing, Juliette recalled her own childhood and how much she liked doing those things, too. She was off and running, determined to carry the idea of a Girl Guides organization to America, her home. The first troop began in Savannah, Georgia, her home town, in 1912. She changed the name to Girl Scouts the following year. To millions of Girl Scouts across the U.S., Juliette Gordon Low is a hero and an inspiration, someone who wouldn't take no for an answer, someone who wanted to do things that "girls shouldn't." This book captures that spirit. Other books in the
series:
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Social Studies for Kids
copyright 2002–2024
David White