Exhibits

Juliette Gordon Low Pinning a Girl Scout with the “Golden Eaglet” circa WWI.

“Come right over, I’ve got something for the girls of Savannah and all America, and all the world, and we’re going to start it tonight!” –Juliette Gordon Low, March 12, 1912

This year marks the centennial anniversary of the Girl Scouts of America (GSA). In celebration, visit the exhibit on the 2^nd floor of Regenstein Library, which showcases materials about the Girl Scouts from the Library’s collections together with Girl Scout memorabilia on loan from Kathryn Grossman and Dana Wennerberg.

On March 12, 1912, Juliette Gordon Low assembled a group of eighteen girls in Savannah, Georgia to establish the first troop. Known as “Daisy” to her family, Juliette was inspired to found a youth organization for girls after she met Sir Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scouts and Girl Guides. Her goal was to teach girls self-reliance and resourcefulness through outdoor activities at a time when women’s roles were severely limited. 

Girl Scouts today participate in many of the same activities as the earliest troops, such as camping, hiking and earning badges. Cookie sales have funded troops since 1917. At the same time, the GSA has always responded to the needs and issues of the times. During World War I, girls learned about food production and conservation, sold war bonds, worked in hospitals, and collected peach pits for use in gas mask filters. After the attacks of September 11, 2001, girls performed community services, hosted remembrance ceremonies, and wrote thank-you letters to rescuers. In its first decade, a Girl Scout could earn over 25 different badges, including Child Nurse. The most recent badges include Global Awareness, Adventure Sports, Stress Less, and Environmental Health.

From its inception, the Girl Scouts of America was committed to inclusivity. The original troop included Christian and Jewish girls, girls from influential Savannah families and girls from a local orphanage. The Girl Scouts was one of the few organizations of its time that welcomed the membership of the physically disabled. Juliette Gordon Low, herself, battled ear infections and was functionally deaf by the time she founded the Girl Scouts. The first African-American troops were established in 1917. One of the earliest Latina troops was formed in Houston in 1922. Girl Scout troops supported Japanese-American girls in internment camps in the 1940s, and by the 1950s, GSA was working to integrate fully all of its troops. In 1956, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called Girl Scouts “a force for desegregation.”

Today, the Girl Scouts of America has 3.2 million members and 50 million alumnae. Girls at home and abroad participate in troops and groups in more than 92 countries through USA Girl Scouts Overseas. Through its membership in the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts, Girl Scouts of the USA has a following of 10 million girls and adults in 145 countries.

Selections adapted from the website for Girl Scouts of America (www.girlscouts.org)

“The hero came straight out of prison into the castle of the Czech kings and Roman emperors… the most powerful rulers in the world visited him, he received honors of a sort not received by any Czech or Slovak spokesman in the past four hundred years. In him the world saw new hope… Vaclav Havel was president for 935 days*. People expected too much from him in too short a time. They wanted to be as rich as the Swiss and as socialized as the Swedes. They wanted him to return to them everything the Communists had taken away; maybe they even wanted back their youth of forty years ago. And the hope that a magnificent life was awaiting them. Havel was like a good king. He would have been happy to do everything for his people. The people projected their desires as well as their bad qualities onto the people in power. Vaclav Havel started to appear to citizens as too moral, too intellectual, too soft, and not strict enough. In fact, too democratic. Maybe they longed at this moment for someone who resembled them more… From great joy and euphoria, people and nations pass into great sadness and depression. Nations behave just like individuals. It takes a long time for them to find their balance. As they grow wiser, they will begin to resemble the king who ran so far ahead of them…”

-Eda Kirseová, Václav Havel: The Authorized Biography. (NY: 1993)

 *The 935 days refers to Havel’s “first” presidency (29 December 1989 – 20 July 1992).

He was Czechoslovakia’s last president and six months later he would then become the new Czech Republic’s first president (February 1993 –February 2003).

 It is nearly impossible to discuss Vaclav Havel’s life and work without resorting to the language of fairy tales and the myths of the ancient Czech lands. The knights of Bohemian legend are said to slumber inside Blanik Mountain, ready to ride out and help the people in times of distress (see the Masaryk Memorial on the east end of the Midway Plaisance for the embodiment of this knight). And so it was with Tomáš Masaryk, the first president of the newly formed country of Czechoslovakia in 1918, and so it was with Vaclav Havel, the first president of the new Czech Republic. At the 20^th century’s beginning and at its close, as this small country hovered on the brink of transformation, it produced leaders of great merit, whose statesmanship was based on deep humanitarian, literary and philosophical principles.

Born into an entrepreneurial and intellectual family which was closely linked to the cultural and political events in Czechoslovakia from the 1920′s – 1940′s, and thus damningly labeled “bourgeois”, Havel was deprived of any entrée into higher education in the humanities, his passion from an early age. Yet, he began publishing poetry in his early 20s, swiftly followed by literary essays and the first of more than 25 plays, few of which were able to be performed in his homeland and all of which were banned from publication for many decades. In 1956, at the age of 20, he delivered an address at a meeting of young writers criticizing the censorship of Czech literature (occurring just after Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin and the cult of personality), catapulting him into notoriety. His plays inevitably led to social action, since, for him, the two were inextricably united:

…theatre doesn’t have to be just a factory for the production of plays… it must be something more: a living spiritual and intellectual focus, a place for social self-awareness, a vanishing point where all the lines of force of the age meet, a seismograph of the times, a space, an area of freedom, an instrument of human liberation. I realized that every performance can be a living and unrepeatable social event, transcending in far-reaching ways what seems, at first sight, to be its significance…

Throughout the 1960s, 70s and 80s, Havel continued writing and continued dissenting in profound and dangerous ways. Protesting the repression of the communist government, he sent an open letter to President Gustáv Husák (1975), co-founded Charter 77 (1977), and the Committee for the Defense of the Unjustly Prosecuted (1978), all of which led to years of imprisonment, house arrest and unrelenting harassment by the government; nevertheless, Havel became one of the leading figures of the Velvet Revolution, and only months after being released from prison in 1989, he was elected president of the country he had refused to leave.

Havel’s presidency focused on human rights and the global responsibility for their observance, the organization and integration of Europe and the place of the Czech Republic within it, globalization, the environment and its conservation. After his second full term in office ended in 2003 until his death in 2010, he continued to promote activities which would lead to a better understanding of these areas of concern.

The exhibit is located in the Fourth Floor Reading Room of the Joseph Regenstein Library, adjacent to the Slavic Reference Collection, and will run through May 2012.