NEWSBYJOSIE CAROTHERS

Ethel Jennings Newton invented Girl Scout cookies in 1934. She was a tall and elegant woman who believed her highest calling was to make the world a better place. She was also my grandmother.

Knowing my grandmother, whom we called "Angel," I can say this: Today, Ethel Jennings Newton would be ashamed of the destruction her inventiveness is causing in the lives of those powerless to stop it.

She would oppose the use of palm oil in Girl Scout cookies—a degradation of the product, by the way, as they originally called for butter—because the cultivation and export of palm oil is destroying rainforests in Southeast Asia and the lives of girls in those countries. She would abhor the fact that girls “overseas,” as she would have put it, are made to suffer in poverty to benefit their American counterparts.

Certainly, she would stand with Madison Vorva and Rhiannon Tomtishen, two dedicated young girls from Michigan who are asking the Girl Scouts to rid Thin Mints, Trefoils and other beloved cookies of this harmful ingredient.

I have signed onto their campaign with the Rainforest Action Network on Change.org, and so have 60,000 others. I wish my grandmother were here to join me in demanding that Girl Scouts CEO Kathy Cloninger to do better than inexplicably claim her organization—one that promotes girls' empowerment—is itself powerless to better this situation.

Ethel Jennings Newton was never powerless. She grew up poor and proud on the prairie in the Midwest, and attended the University of Chicago on scholarship at the beginning of the 20th century, when few women were accepted into higher education. Interested in expanding knowledge of the world, she pioneered a new method for teaching social studies. At the same time, knowing the privations of poverty, she was drawn to volunteer at Jane Addams’ Hull House in Chicago as a social worker before such an occupation existed.