Helen Gurley Brown in 1964.
Helen Gurley Brown was the editor of Cosmo magazine for 32 years. During her tenure she revived the ailing magazine into the “love, sex and money” guide it remains today. Brown injected humor and sex into the pub, most notably proclaiming a woman’s right to good sex.
At the time, her stance was revolutionary, and its effects are far-reaching, even the women’s movement.
Brown’s living legacy (she is still alive) has faltered as women’s equal rights has become more of an assumption than a daily struggle.
Salon has a great piece on Brown’s complicated history – via a review of a new biography on Brown, “Bad Girls Go Everywhere” by Jennifer Scanlon – as to how Brown has gone from being a pioneer to an out-of-touch relic.
Here are some snippets:
As [the author sees it] any young woman claiming entitlement to career opportunities and a satisfying sex life, financial independence and sensational lipstick, abortion rights and a darling apartment, owes a lot to Helen Gurley Brown. The face of feminism today — at least in the hedonistic, individualistic version embraced by many young single women, including some who wouldn’t necessarily call it “feminism” — is more her creation than Friedan’s or Steinem’s.
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Able to attend no more than a semester of college, she supported her mother and sister in a series of 17 secretarial jobs in the 1940s and ’50s. Finally, she landed a copywriter’s gig at an advertising agency in Los Angeles, a break that partially inspired the story of Peggy Olson on “Mad Men.” By the end of the ’50s, although she became the highest-paid female copywriter on the West Coast, she’d hit what would become known as the glass ceiling. At 35, after having thoroughly enjoyed her single years (albeit, often in the company of other women’s husbands), she decided to marry. At 37, she landed David Brown, a magazine editor turned studio executive. It was only then that she turned to the work that would make her famous: playing guru to America’s unmarried women.
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[Brown urged her readers] to find gratification and financial independence in work rather than relationships, but she insisted that women had carnal appetites commensurate with men’s and were perfectly entitled to fulfill them, whether or not they were married.
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Underlying all of the tension between Brown and other feminist leaders was, Scanlon believes, a drumbeat of unacknowledged class prejudice. Friedan and Steinem were graduates of Smith, a Seven Sisters college, and their constituencies, at least initially, were middle-class housewives and college graduates looking for more meaningful lives and work. Brown’s designated readers were secretaries, receptionists and file clerks working to survive and hopeful of getting ahead so they could sample the very luxuries — pretty clothes, cosmetics, sex (and possibly marriage) with generous, professional men — from which Friedan and Steinem had become alienated.
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“My relevance is that I deal with reality,” Brown said.
The author of this piece, Laura Miller, puts it best when she says, “One of the occupational hazards of the reformer’s life is that when you really succeed at it, eventually people will forget the problem was there to begin with.”
Full article here.
Posted in Cosmopolitan magazine, Mad Men, Relationships, education, fashion, feminism, magazines, premarital, sex, strong women
Tags: cosmopolitan, feminism, feminist, helen gurley brown, salon magazine, strong women, writers
The New Yorker’s Ariel Levy re-treads familiar ground on the issue of modern-day feminism, asking, “why has feminism, which managed to win so many battles—the notion of a woman with a career has become perfectly unexceptionable—remained anathema to millions of women who are the beneficiaries of its success?”
my most favorite buxom “mannequin” has reached a considerable pinnacle — cover numero due of VOGUE. (the other was her cover and countless editorials in 
