as i could. there are two indices they're nothing but quotations. i did not have space in the book. think those two sections are the most fund. . . . .

>> magic, i'm going to put my water bottles there. ak, i'm so excited to be here with you all today. we are coming up on a great and amazing anniversary, celebration, very exciting. before a beginner need to thank the founder and president of the national library and museum site and all the wonderful staff members who helped us here including martha and lucinda fraley and the one behind the curtain. thank you for bringing me here in thank you for all the work, not an inconsiderable task. every girl has her understanding of juliet gordon low and i want to talk about her life to give you the encapsulated biography of her, concentrating on the big topics i think today and then

there will be at least one slide and therefore girl scouts because i know that when i speak to audiences about juliette low i have to split the difference between those who know nothing about her and those who know a lot about herb. so here we go. here we go. here we go. jeremy, we are not going. there we go. thanks jeremy. juliette gordon low founded the most important organization for girls and women in the history of this nation but if i put this picture up and doesn't have a sea of green no one will be able to identify her and i find that stunning. she led a fascinating life. woven throughout with sadness and great joy. she was an optimist, a bit eccentric, very intrepid and very courageous and very fun loving and a phenomenal and visionary social reformer. so let's learn about her from the very beginning.

she was born in savannah, georgia. i'm sure some of you have been to her home in savannah, georgia. 1860 juliette gordon low was born before the civil war began in this was her father, confederate veteran. how am i going backwards? there. this was her father. [laughter] he was a confederate veteran and he impressed upon his daughter the importance of duty and i think he gave her that never say die attitude that comes with serving in the lost cause. mother was the founding father of chicago and nelly kinsey gordon taught her daughter the importance of giving back to a community who gave so much to her. she saw a loving and devoted marriage at work. these two were dedicated to one

another from the day they met until the day they died. she was also, she also gained a clear understanding of the importance of religion to nelly and willie and this became important for her. juliette gordon low was a devout episcopalian for her entire life. her religious faith was of supreme importance to her. the child in the back, this tallest one. she was not the oldest daughter, she was not in his daughter, she was not the son, she was one of many children born to the gordon's. she was known as crazy daisy. in a lots of stories told about her behavior. i will just tell you one. she was young in savannah, strangely cold night in savannah and juliette gordon was worried about the family cow. she was a very kindhearted girl. she went to the guest bedroom

upstairs and she took the blanket off the bed, ran downstairs in the dark, wrapped the cow in the blanket, secured the blanket and went to bed certain that the cow would be fine. stun the most -- next morning to find the blanket on the ground, trampled on the ground. there a lot of crazy daisy stories and most of them seem to me having to do with how kind she was. when she gets a little older, she is 18 i noticed in searching the record that the crazy daisy stories began to fade away and what happens i believe is that as she ages and matures, she comes to have our own sense of herself and she doesn't need to have this kind of crazy persona in the family any more. i think crazy daisy worked for her as a girl because she carved out a niche for herself in the family this way. she was the one who could amuse. she was the one that could make

things better with a joke, with a funny story and this was a way to help her family through hard times and it gave her a secure position in the family but as i said when she got older, crazy daisy went away. when she is older she meets these two women. juliette low had a very good education for her time. her mother was a big fan of education for women so she went off to boarding school and she actually had quite a cosmopolitan existence because of her boarding school experiences up and down the east coast. the woman on your left is at the lipid hunter. she was friends with these women until the very end. partially because i wanted to know how important friendships were to a woman who found an organization based on making new friends so what i discovered was

these friends were extraordinarily important her, sustaining in fact. this is the home that juliette gordon low knew very well. this is happy with it's home in providence rhode island and the girls won't appear quite a bit. now this is abby. abbie loves sports. if you have read the book already you will know this is the woman and the president nicknamed icicle. she didn't like being named the icicle but she did have that reserve so this is where that came from. now, what i discovered about at the quite apart from her friendship with juliette low is that abby had a sister named jenny who was profoundly deaf from scarlett the red h2. mrs. lipid said, i will teach my daughter to speak. training for deaf children, the

standard procedure was to use sign language but she said sign language will be a wall between my daughter and all those hearing people so i will teach her to speak so against all odds, she taught her how to speak and she was what we would say called mainstream their mainline. she went to a normal school and in jeddah perfectly happy life. now i wonder what it means to juliette gordon low to have her best friend's sister conquer it in the language of the day. they all knew one another and they all hang out together so juliette juliette low had an example of jen lippett who had conquered and overcome her deafness. what did this mean? at the very least i think it was juliette low having an understanding of what it was. this is hidehall and hidehall is in cooperstown new york. is the home of her other friend.

mary gail was very kind in a very gentlewoman but she also came from a family with a very deep, bane of depression perhaps bipolar disorder. is hard to know but suicidal tendencies read in the family. her father committed suicide. hurt sister committed suicide. she had a brother who is suicidal. mary herself was suicidal and so this was a very difficult but different kind of disability for the era. juliette louden never abandoned mary and i think again another testimony to the importance of friendship despite the odds. well, this is juliette gordon low's younger sister alice said alice died in 1880, just a little bit after the time that mary's sister died so here is alice, passed away, terrible tragedy for the family.

is the first break in the family circle and daisy is in a difficult position of having to mother her mother because mrs. gordon has fallen apart. i can imagine what it would he like to loose lose a child and mrs. gordon was just brokenhearted. she had no time to take care of her other children. the eldest daughter, eleanor, was abroad so daisy had to mother her mother, take care of her father and keep the household together. there was no one to look after daisy. enter the young man with whom she falls in love. despite the fact that her father said to her, not as man who is learn to work and support himself is preferable for a husband. to a man born rich, daisy fell in love with william loeb or as her father called him, the idle englishman. [laughter] now he said to daisy you are beautiful, you are charming so i think it was an important timing

to understand the relationship. i think she really loved him and as far as i know he truly loved her. they were married in 1886. this was the day that as the wedding couple got in a carriage are well-wisher threw rice and a piece of rice lodged in juliette low's year. this was complicated by the fact that 23 months earlier, her same ear had been treated with a caustic substance called silver nitrate. so the kind of double whammy of the rice which got lodged in her ear and became infected and the silver nitrate which caused extreme pain in that ear, together with a childhood full of your infections may juliette low very hard of hearing. how hard of hearing? she was not profoundly deaf like jen lippett was.

juliette low's hearing went up and down depending on a variety of things, ambient noise, smog,, timidity, her physical health and even her emotional health her friends said. juliette juliette low could hear sometimes some things in other day she couldn't hear very well at all. her hearing went from bad to worse because her other ear was compromised as well. so here she is, juliette low, young married woman about to enter her husband's world. her husband's world was one that she referred to later as one of frothing bubbles and this froth and bubble world was full of people who were yachtsmen and hunters, big game hunters. they went fishing and they raise horses. in the spring they were in london for the season and then they went shooting in scotland in the fall. they spent their summers in the english countryside. juliette is at the very top there. these were all kinds of

aristocratic and elite friends in england and they included this man, the prince of wales, the notorious womanizer, and then you -- so they bought the wellborne house in yorkshire england. this is a modern-day picture and i have a friend there who flew the american flag on the anniversary of girl scouting. that is what this is. so the couple moved into the home and began to entertain but will he began to spend more and more time on his horses. willie loved horses. he raised and sold horses. he also loved cars. this building was where he first big -- cap the first automobile and if you look above the white door you can see he inscribed it in the building when he had it for his cars. willie is spending more and more time away. more and more time with his friends. he won't let daisy go hunting with him.

he has put a barrier against her going to at lease one racetrack and so will he says, i am going away. i will be gone. see you later. what this daisy, juliette gordon low i should say, juliette low's nickname was always daisy. what did juliette low do? she took of metal working. is not what every woman would do? she made the skates. she decided she needed gate kate soshi learn how to work in metal. when i was inside wells i saw this edge. did juliette low make this? i think there's a good possibility she might have. i spent time in the book trying to figure out how juliette low could have learned how to work in metal and what that meant. she also in her spare time took up wood carving, of course. i have a hunch is where she's learned how to carve wood. i think the woman with whom she

spent time carping probably made this. juliette low is trying to be faithful to the early lesson she learned from her father and mother about civic duty and responsibility and giving back even though her husband forbade it. willie low said i would rather have a trophy wife and i don't want you to be trailing your skirt through. what does she do? juliette low well-versed in the testament decided she would do her good deed in secret so she befriended a leopard in the north of wells. no one else would speak to the slapper. she donated time to do to her house and worked with the poor there. she spent time working with the wells nursing association. she did some other work that will he knew about with a local church and so forth. in 1898, she worked with her mother at a convalescent hospital, helping -- they were not veterans yet but men who were sick and could not fight,

with tropical diseases. she worked with very ill soldiers. willie knew about this but by that time he did not matter too much because by that time enter and abatement, the other woman. so girl scouts this is the first time you have seen a picture of and abatement. anup bateman was on the cover of country "life" magazine, and magazine in england geared towards the elite english. what did juliette low do when her husband fell in love with another one on? well she did exactly what he told her not to do and that is she went off to work in a settlement home. now if you know of the best-known settlement house you know i am guessing would be in chicago with jane addams home was helped out the extremely poor. this is a later photograph of the talbott street settlement house in the slums of london. juliette low worked with the working girls club.

i find this fascinating and it connects a lot of dots for me as a woman historian to know that juliette low before she ever connected with the girl guides and girl scouts had experience working with the poor girls in downtown london. here is mrs. bateman, a little bit later picture. juliette gordon low did something extraordinary for her time and that is she filed for divorce. scandalous. if you were in juliette low's class you would just get over it. juliette said no, my marriage means something to me and he has been unfaithful. then willie low became ill with a terminal countless and she said, i had better call up that divorce because i can't divorce a man who is dying. then willie low got better and picked up with anup bateman again and juliette low said, the half with that. i'm going to reinstitute the

work but before that divorce was finalized willie low died. here she is in 1905. this is a slide for you girl scouts. that is juliette low on your right and that is anna bateman on the left. i have no comment. i just wanted you to see it. the first time anyone has ever seen the wife and mistress site eyesight. i know. i'm not saying it though. alright, so 1905 juliette gordon low his widowed. she has learned that her husband left all this money to his mistress. she fogged with their sisters-in-law to regain some of the money which she did or cauchy was never poor but it was another heartbreaking battle for her to fight. so, now, what do you do when you're in your mid-40s and you are widowed? she could pursue art.

art -- it was difficult to break into art as it is now. she loved to travel when she and she did some of that. juliette low wind to places that most people did not go. she went to india, she went to egypt, she bagged herself a tiger. her husband said you cannot go game hunting with me so once he was dead, she shot a tiger. she could have taking care of the elderly and the young and her family. this is her younger sister mabel and fables to children. at such a beautiful photograph. i just wanted to show it to you. juliette low could have taking care of her nieces and nephews but because her hearing was so bad juliette low said i don't think i should take care of the ill for fear i will not hear them when they need a cell that is something i should not do. she could get married again. a gentleman asked her to marry him, it and archie hunter who had many nail friends, many

female friends. she decided not to marry him although they remained friends for a long time. soshi could go back to doing social work which she did. i don't know how much time she spent there, don't think a lot but she kept her hand and with the working girls club. she could spend time with her friends which she did. this man was a dear friend of hers. they had flying a common. he took up flying airplanes later in his life in juliette low left airplanes. this man is also a cousin to this man. this is robert boden-powell and his wife all of boden-powell and juliette gordon low on your right. now he was a war hero. he was famous all over england and beyond. he was known as a military scout, a tracker and he was famous for --

he was so famous that juliette low was determined she was not going to like him because she had other friends of the british military who she thought deserved much more praise and much more honor than they had gotten since he had gotten it all. so she had lunch with him in 1910, sat across the table from him and was determined not to be interested. this lasted until about the soup course. [laughter] when she found herself smitten, both with him -- they had a lot of common -- and with his children. so boy scouting, she was fascinating with the track in the scouting,, the topography and the jack-up become the travel, the outdoor experiences of scouting. she was also very much in tune with boden-powell's desire to grow better men through this program, men who were prepared for their future. the most important thing that juliette gordon low about the scanning program was that it

brought fun to boys, the emphasis on fund was what she liked. so she said i will take some of the girls interested in scouting and i will me good girl guides true. whenever boys gathered in uniform at scouting gatherings, girls were there around the edges. this was a bit shocking to people at the time. girls began to copy their brothers uniforms and made their own uniforms curb. uniform skirt. girls in uniform said voice gatherings, shocking. boden-powell told them i think there are parts of my program that will be wonderful for girls but i'm not going to open it to girls till he gave them to his sisters agnes boden-powell. she spent a lot of time with robert boden-powell because they had quite a friendship. so juliette low had a home in scotland. she determined she would start with a very poor rural earls in

scotland so she taught herself how to spend and how to weave so she could teach her girls how to spin and we. why? because these poor rural girls did not have a rosy economic future. so she said i will teach you how to make handicrafts that i will then take to london and sell so that you will have more money and then you will have a business established. she taught them how to raise chickens with eggs that could be sold in that area of scotland. juliette juliette low immediate saw a very concrete way to benefit girls through girl scouting. quite above and beyond all the other aspects of scouting that she loved. so, she took the girls guides idea from scotland to her home in london where she founded to other girl guides groups, one for urban poor girls and one for urban wealthy girls. juliette gordon low goes to savannah in 1912. she has experience with regard

groups, urban, rural poor and wealthy. so this is what everyone knows. in 1912 she said i have something for the girls in savannah and all-america and all the world and were going to start it tonight. this is what she said to her cousin when she determined she would ring girl scouting to the united states in 1912. now, this was her organization from the very beginning. it was a one-woman show at the start. there we go. just wanted to make sure you were still awake and make you a little busy out there. this is a letter from her. what is this, girl scouts? she imagined at first what it should look like. so her organization begins with

her friends. juliette low uses her money to start the organization. she wrote the first manual. she designed the badges and the pins including this one which then she turned into this. she patented it. juliette juliette low was sensible enough to erect legal boundaries around her organization and she could do this because she sought the divorce so she knew about attorneys and how they worked. she loved the idea of camping. getting grossed out into the fresh air was extremely important for them but camping also taught girls self-sufficiency including girls who are stuck in dresses and boots and high heels all day so this got them out and they had to think about mosquitoes and how much water and how much food could they bring in and how did they pitch their tent? this was all very new to girls at the time. sports was important as well. you can see their shocking bloomers. juliette low love sports. she played all manner of sports.

this was in savannah and she erected a curtain across the course of this opinions would not be, their sensibility would not be shocked by seeing girls with bloomers back but curtains did, they kept people out but they also piqued peoples interest. people wanted to look around the curtain to see what was going on so she got a good number of girls from that curtain. juliette gordon low was always involved with the girls. here she is with one of the cows. but she also set up a national board of directors. her family was involved. her mother was on the first board of directors. she got her first donation from her brother-in-law. she pressed one brother into being an attorney for the organization and went to being an accountant for the organization. she created -- moved to washington d.c. in 1913 when she only had a couple hundred girls. she decided she had to have a national headquarters.

with only a couple hundred girls. i love that. here we saw the publicity as well. she was the one who made the first initiative to the united states first lady's. this is mrs. hoover of course but she copied the boy boy scouts. the boy scouts had a natural honorary president and juliette love that idea. she campaigned tirelessly for more girls, more troops, more training, more camps. she was monomaniacal about her organization. she oversaw every part of it. she cared about every detail. she was involved in every aspect. it began because of juliette low and a group because of juliette low, family member by family member, friend by friend, she was ours involve. world war i is the make it up at scouting. world war i began to 1914 in europe and she is a transit reddick figure. she has got a foot in both countries so she observes how these girl scouts, called girl guides in england, how they

participated in the war effort and juliette low's vision was to see that american girls wanted to be taken seriously and wanted also to participate in this important national crisis. so she led them and preparedness parades. in the beginning of the war years there were 4000 girl scouts. by the end of the first world war there were 41,000 girl scouts. girl scouting grew tremendously because she understood the girls wanted to be taken seriously, to be useful to this and to be involved. girl scouts in the united states sold nearly $10 million worth of liberty bonding. that is what they are doing here. they collected scrap metal to contribute to the war effort. new troops sprang into being. they rolled bandages and learn to emergency first aid, wartime health care. the domestic focus of scouting

continue. juliette low from the very beginning said girl scouting needs to place an equal and this is on domestic training for girls who will be wives and mothers and career training for girls who need to have another path. she herself understood from her own experience that you may plan and repair to be a mother but it does not always work out. so girls during world war i learned how to feed their families, how to care for their homes and how to take your the young and elderly and as they did so they freed up their mothers for war work. they also learned cartography, dietetics, morse code. they planted victory gardens and they have learned how to can them preserve fruits and vegetables to free food up for the soldiers. they needed for soldiers. they made scrapbooks for them and later they worked as veterans. girl scouting was tremendously popular during world war i.

americans saw girls contribute and every time girl scouts did something important and good, they did it in uniform, very very visible role. now, the war and. 1920, juliette low makes one of the hardest decision she ever had to make and that is she steps down from her own organization. i submit to it is a wise leader who knows when it's time to step away. so she handed over the reins to hurt god better, and go hide choate. and what she did was to spend her time working on international girl guiding and girl scouting. juliette juliette low understood how horrible world war i had been. 50 million people dead because of this war. friendships battered -- shattered, friendships broken and she said one way to make sure we never have a war again

is to help girls in all countries know about each other so international friendships through girl guiding and girl scouting was a way to make sure war never happened again. if you are venezuelans and you knew about the life of a grilling canada, how can we go to war? that is what she saw. 1920 america is an extremely isolationist america. americans were ready to walk away from europe in that horrible war. not juliette low. she said we have to reengage with your. we must be involved. is the only way to avoid war. well, in 1923, she developed breast cancer. i discovered some interesting -- the juliette juliette low head during her life. she love new technology. including a treatment called the radio here which she had.

they put you in the room the size of a shower in it a few and radium. she had several radium cures in her life. in 1927 she died. she had not slowed down from the breast cancer at all. she continued to travel to the end spreading the importance of friendship, education, prepared a self-sufficiency and above all fun for the girls. it was in savannah georgia that she died in the last thing she did was to write a letter to her friend, mary. she was one of the lucky people her brother said because she died having realized her dream. juliette low saw her organization, the girl scouts of the united states of america come to fruition spread across the nation, spread around the world. she saw material changes in the lives of girls and women as the result of the prep and the she began and like every good ceo

she left her organization in tip top shape when she died. they had a recognizable brand. they had a large number of trained leaders and splendid training corps for these leaders. there was a loyal board of directors. it was financially sound. so she was a very content common at the end of her life. she knew she was going to die. she knew she was going to die in her life work was in front of her. she has been celebrated by her home state of georgia. she has been celebrated by girl scouts all around the world. what is her legacy? you are. all of you who are wearing green or brown or brownies. all of you are her legacy. 50 million american women and girls have been girl scouts in the 100 years since year since girl scouting began.

her legacy is everyone like you and also people like laura bush, hillary rodham clinton, ann landers,, shirley temple, lucille ball, debbie reynolds, my grandmother, mother, me, we were all, all of us. here we are looking back 100 years which is quite fitting. not a lot of organizations make it 100 years. 100 years is truly worth a celebration. we are looking back at this remarkable woman whose life, his choices and choice went into the making of this organization that mean so much to so many people in what i find amazing as a historian is i know if we could bring juliette low out right now she would say that path, let's look at the future, let's look at the future of girl scouting and where the ergen station is going and what more we can help to make it grow. thank you very much for your time.

[applause] the best part of every program is the questions. let's hear your questions. first i want to thank you for doing this. i was very impressed when you showed the picture. it really struck home that girl scouts know who she is in other and other people don't and thank you very much. where did you get all the pictures? they're wonderful. >> the pictures of juliette low are scattered. the library of congress had many. some are in the national

historic preservation center in the girls got archives in new york city and the wonderful extraordinary woman friend harold and cathy at the juliette gordon low birthplace in savannah georgia has been more generous than i had a right to expect with photographs. there are some from the georgia historical society and a couple were from friends of mine. they brownies girt -- brownie circle was from -- i want to thank you all. it is so touching for me to hear you speak and i'm a second-generation girl scout. my daughter and niece are third-generation girl scouts. my mother was my leader and i am their leader so it's wonderful. my question is, this week we celebrated national women's -- >> international women's day. >> international women's day and i wonder how we can spread it around? we have an entire month devoted

to the african-american culture and we have one day for women and most people didn't even know that day was here. is girl scouts and as a woman is touring can you make any suggestions for us to make that day more noticeable to people? >> a lot of people -- so we have the whole month. it began in 1981. the objective was to write women back into history. so we have done this. we have faithfully done this and your girls are learning a whole lot more about women than their grandmothers ever did, that's for sure. so we do know about people like sojourner truth and jane addams and what we don't know is juliette gordon low. because she really did create the most important organization for girls and women in the history of the country. she is not in the history books. she is not in the social studies textbooks. what can we do about that?

i wrote it book. [laughter] so you know you can read the book. you can educate your girls about juliette low. there are books out there for younger girls won by linda wadsworth and one by shenon cord cord so educating girls, telling the story to other people as part of it. you girls when your projects to do for school, do it on juliette gordon low. teacher classmates about juliette gordon low and the rest of us it's just a matter of spreading the word. here's a shameless plug. one thing you can do is go to amazon and read the look. you can write about them, write why it's important because people tend to buy books. i don't know how to educate if we don't have a feature on juliette low although that would be a great idea. spread the word in any way you can. i hope what we will have our

history books published. her name will be there. do you see this brownie right here? she had a question. do you remember the question? oh, put her on the spot. [laughter] is the television cameras gearing you? there is one, in the back. >> thank you for coming today. really appreciate the history and sharing your knowledge. my question is you talked a lot about the event that may have influenced juliette. juliette. are there any women that were significant to her and significant to inspire and her and inspiring her mission? >> well, here is one connected question, answer. here is an answer that connects to the question about women's

history month and juliette low. juliette low was part of the larger progressive area -- era reform movement. juliette low was a part of it. there was a child welfare movement and a playground movement, settlement house movement. many reformers were involved in trying to make the world better. juliette low was in this movement i would suppose but not of it. if that is the way on to say it. she was not familiar with these women or their work is far as i can tell. she knew jane addams but she knew jane addams because of her family background so i think this is one of the reason she is not in the text with. her life does not intersect with these women so who is her big influence?

her mother. her mother was her big influence and a staunch supporter. i think they had a generally warm relationship throughout most of their lives although it could be tenth but she had a good role model and her mother. her mother was the founder of the red cross chapter in georgia and she was an author and she had done many things. that was probably her biggest influence and then she was friends, friendly with robert boden-powell and alice boden-powell and then of course in girl scouting is where she found her biggest circle of friends. she had dear dear friends in girl scouting from among her -- nobody wants to ask about the deafness? >> how did her deafness worked

with her not being able to hear certain things that she did not want to hear and continuing on her vision? >> this is a story that girl scouts know well. juliette low was unstoppable, completely optimistic but also she could just not take no for an answer. the way she did it, and we have many women say this, juliette low would stop you and say, so good to see you, you are just what i had in mind to take over this troop. she said i won't be too much work, don't worry but i am certain you are perfect for the job. the wind would look at her and say i'm sorry, can't do that mrs. low. i have all these other applications and then she would turn her deaf ear to you and say i told him he them you will be there tuesday. she did this over and over again. what i discovered though, she

was not completely deaf. i don't really know how deaf she was when she turned a deaf ear to you but it was certainly a very good way to spread girl scouting i would say. certainly a good way to get volunteers. there are women who said i hated to work walk out of church with juliette low because i knew. [laughter] any other questions? >> how did girl scouts get spread all around the world? >> how to girl scouts get spread all around the world? that is a great question. girl scouts got spread all around the world through many ways. one was women who work role scouts themselves and troop leaders who travel to other countries, sometimes with the military and sometimes with these organizations and sometimes with health organizations.

he got spread through lettering. if you like being a brownie than you might write a letter to your friend in england or in china or it might be spread that way. so it was also a very conscious effort on the part of the girl guiding scout leaders because juliette low believed as to the leadership in england that girl guiding and girl scouting could make every girl's life better, every girl, every ethnicity, every religion, every can class, every background. life could be improved by girl scouting so in that way they tried very hard to make it happen. a great question. >> did she get involved at all and suffrage for women? >> was juliette gordon low involved in suffrage in the answer is, no she was not.

in her papers it's pretty clear that she was herself in favor of women's suffrage but one of the most critical parts of girl scouting was that it should be run locally. juliette gordon low was the daughter of the -- so she did not want to impose from above a party line on girl scouting. for fear that women in mississippi might not be in favor of separate but women in new york might be so she did not want to alienate any of them because she wanted to focus on the girl said she didn't want to put an agenda from the top. by 1921 women were given the vote, she had just stepped down from the leadership of the organization and so it was not, it wasn't something she wanted to focus on. she was trying to grow girl scouting however they're wonderful photographs and some of you may and have seen them of

girls binding while the mothers were offloading. so, it was utter she. >> how many girl scouts were in the first girl scout troops? >> how many girl scouts were in the first girl scout troops is a great question too. the answer is we don't really know. the first girl scout troop was probably started in the savannah orphanage among orphans. not among the elite girls. the reason we don't know is because she was really a remarkable woman, she truly was. she had many many strengths. i would say that keeping was not her forte. and so, the register of girl scouts and savannah, there is really no logic in it whatsoever. so it is very difficult to track with girls, with leaders, with order, when troops came into being so we don't really know

how many girls. we don't really know where the first troop was. there are a lot of things we don't really know. how is that for a nonanswer? pretty good. in the far back. >> were the first troops inter-racial? were they segregated and when did they become inter-racial or you know, cultural mix and religious mix and stuff like that? >> right, the first girl scout troop in savannah georgia in the spring of 1912, as far as we can tell, were definitely in mixed and religious backgrounds. may be a better way to think about this is the juliette low as i just said was interested in benefiting all girls, so she could have as the founder, she could have said we are going to

have girl scouting only for this type of girl, not this type of girl. as she never did that. so the earliest troops had catholics. there were jewish girl than partisan girls. the earliest troops were composed of factory girls. there were elite girls and there they were middle-class girls. there were girls of all ethnic backgrounds. some of these girls were in troops that we might call today mixed but juliette gordon low also said if you want to have a truth that is all catholic girls, you can do that. if you want to have a troop that is all jewish girls are all factory girls, you can do that. she was not nearly as concerned about the exact configuration of the troop issue was concerned with girl scouting reaching all girls. i know from oral interviews that the first, the very earliest girl scout troop included african-american girls, segregated deaf and i.

was 1912 in the deep south so we are not looking at integrated troops then and the question about official troops of african-american girls does not come up until many years later and at that point in time juliette gordon low could have said we are going to have no official african-american troops. she did not say that. she said we will not have an official policy on it so we will let the women in new jersey decide what they want to do, with that women in ohio disabled they want to do and let the women in georgia decided they want to do. i give her full marks for not separating out girls of any sort in her mother told her to do so. her mother said, juliette you cannot have african-american girl scouts. she said mother, not doing it that way. everybody can come in.

>> we are very grateful to you for coming here and everybody here has had this wonderful opportunity and thank you from the national first ladies library for having all of us. >> thank you very much. [applause] >> the for more information visit the author's web site, stacey cordery.com. >> it was in epidemiology for people who may not know the low five blowup conficker, just the first have about how you did talk about it showing up, guess it was johnny talked about it. you sorted describe the beast here. >> the worm itself popped up on sri's honeypot and honey net actually and it was on the monitor. one of, what happens was when a new piece of malware came a line would pop up on this monitor in

their world these readouts defining what this is, one of which is a column which indicates how well recognized this virus is to the major antivirus industry and the vendors. this one was recognized by none. that is the first thing that got his attention and then the next thing that happened was that it was rep locating so rapidly that within 24 hours it is shoving every other piece of malware out of honeypot. the only readouts on his screen work can figure, can configure, conficker, can pick her. he said i literally had nothing else to work on at that point. what they discovered at sri when it began to dissect it was that it was very very sophisticated piece of malware. it was highly encrypted. one of the things that it did was to check to see if the computer was about to infect hadi ukrainian keyboard and it was self-destructive the computer did. but basically what a worm like this does is penetrate to the

core of your operating system and replicate itself, sends out and infects every other computer on your network and it also began calling home to a remote controller. the remote controller, the way you would ordinarily kill it botnet is he would chop off his head as you can intersect that communication. you can effectively kill the botnet so to prevent that the worm had an algorithm that generated randomly 250 new domains every day, so that the botnet had to be behind only one of those 250 doors on a given day whereas in order if you want to cut this thing off you would have to shut down all 250 domains every single day and so that was one example of the coming nature of this thing and rick who may be here tonight, t.j. mentioned him a moment ago, actually began buying up all of this and putting him on his

credit card which gives you a sense of how ad hoc this effort was to try to stop it. >> before we go further down the path of the worm's evolution i just wanted to give back to that question of -- a question for t.j.. i have a very old e-mail address and i have a filter in front of it. >> what is that? [laughter] >> i think most of the people know. >> and since most malware i take it is distributed by botnet, and in the form of well, the level of spam has some correlation that the level of malware is an infection. i remember a year ago, a large botnet was taken down in for a wild spam fell off but i have to say that if i look historically

at the number of spam messages every day it looks like it is probably 10 to 20% worse than it was before that happened. and my good indicator of the state -- >> it's a perspective situation so the operation you are referring to is operation b107 the botnet take down. we laughed at some of the reports were coming in. one of them was 5% in one of them was 10% and one of them was 30% so we looked at them like what was the real number and we determined it was a perspective thing so we called our friends at hotmail and said did we do anything good for you guys? we see a drop-off of his band of .07%. i was like, i was hoping for a bigger number. a lot of the webmail providers have things in place to prevent

spam. they have been blocking a lot of the spam that was hitting already so we had a small impact with hotmail but some other organizations particularly private companies, they saw huge drop-off because the big spammers would really be sending e-mail to hotmail because they knew we were lobbying and i'm assuming gmail and yahoo! have similar countermeasures. they said they largely manage the spam issue but the thing we saw when we were watching our honeypot, it was sending it out to a whole bunch of different domains, so we definitely saw hotmail spam leap at that spam would never make it into an inbox because of the filtering on our site. i don't know what the real number is but i know when we start to look at these things going back to the original question, and look at how many millions of my customers are being impacted by this malware is its running something else, just based on our testing. we look at a little differently.

spam gives us cause to sit in a courtroom and say hey they are harming us but i look at how many of my customers are being impacted. when we started to look at it in particular then on the show they would reach out to her destruction that we can attract so we would attempt to download a patch might download center and a specific way. we would fingerprint that so we knew how many machines we were dealing with. with. one of the criteria that we looked at in the conficker case was a big botnet and the stock was a big botnet. how many people are being negatively impacted by this piece of malware? i think the state is not great on the internet but the past couple years i've really seen a surge in internet service providers, technology companies take taken more of an interest knowing private companies can do more to protect folks so i think the dark days are behind us. [laughter]

i need some type of wood. i think we are getting that but as we start to understand there are more things we can do we are kind of coming out of that that's order last conference we had about two weeks ago, we have been doing conferences for about 10 years now. >> this is on the heels of the international botnet task force. we are starting to get people to talk about how can we be more operational? how can my company help? i would love for spam to go away as a distribution but from a perspective, there's a certain perspective that shows that might be the case that we don't know. >> so this book is a whodunit except i still feel that we don't know whodunit. i just wanted to check in with you guys to see where we are and they're been a couple of things that have happened. take me through where the law enforcement aspect of the worm

is and your conclusive sense of where you are. >> my suspicion is and i can't say with any certainty, that the authorities do know who was behind it, and i suspect there is difficulty and apprehending them but has more to do with dealing with government and foreign laws and police agencies than it does with actually fighting them. but we do know about the losses of the world without having -- that they are tremendously sophisticated programmers and the reason i used the word, the plural is it is almost certainly not one person. the worm conficker demonstrated such a high level proficiency and so many different areas that it is literally impossible to match one person who would have that level of ability and that level of knowledge in so many different areas at the same time

so the likely culprit is a well-funded, probably funded by an organized crime syndicate, who set out to create a very large, very stable botnet which could be used as a platform for all manner of mischief, a moneymaking platform. >> if you look at the early indications of how conficker was being leveraged, strong ties to some type of affiliate program. the keyboard check is really interesting because nobody wants to be arrested by local authorities for compromising machines in their country. really looking towards eastern europe to find out what that looks like but it is one of those really interesting -- we referred the cases early on. they have been working the case