The Girl Scouts would probably never have come into being if the Boy Scouts had not been exclusively for boys. During the first decade of the twentieth century several thousand girls had wanted to join the new youth group created by General Sir Robert Baden-Powell in England shortly after the Boer War in South Africa, and a parallel organization called the Girl Guides had been quickly organized, with Baden-Powell's sister Agnes at its head.

Juliette Gordon Low, a native of Savannah, Georgia, had married an Englishman; at the time that she met the Baden-Powells in 1910, she was a wealthy widow who had survived her increasingly abusive marriage, and now had both energy and funds to spare. After a turn at leading a Guides group in Scotland, Low threw herself with gusto into creating an American analogue to the organization, and on returning to Savannah in 1912 formed...