The background
Helen Gurley Brown, the author and journalist credited with introducing frank discussions of sex into women’s magazines during her 32-year career as the editor of Cosmopolitan, has died at the age of 90. Cosmopolitan was a straight-laced publication aimed at suburban housewives until Brown took the helm in 1965. She transformed it into the magazine of choice for sexually liberated, career-focussed “Cosmo girls.”
Brown was born into a family of modest means in rural Arkansas. She became a writer of advertising copy after working in a variety of secretarial roles, reported Ben Quinn at The Guardian. She was 37 when she married twice-divorced David Brown, a former Cosmopolitan managing editor turned movie producer who encouraged her to write a book about her life as a singleton. Sex and the Single Girl, her best-selling 1962 collection of advice, opinion and anecdote on why being female and single shouldn’t mean being sexless, made her a celebrity in the US. Brown was hired three years later by Hearst Magazines to turn around Cosmopolitan’s flagging fortunes. She spearheaded the magazine’s growth to a peak of just over three million readers in 1983. Brown left in 1997 with 70 international editions of the magazine on newsstands and the readership having leveled off to 2.5 million.
“Sex is one of the three best things we have, and I don’t know … the other two,” said Brown.
New York mayor pays tribute
Quoted in The Guardian, New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg said the city had “lost a pioneer who reshaped not only the entire media industry but the culture of the US.” He added: “She was a role model for the millions of women whose private thoughts, wonders and dreams she addressed so brilliantly in print. She was a quintessential New Yorker: never afraid to speak her mind and always full of advice. She pushed boundaries and often broke them, clearing the way for younger women to follow in her path.”
“Good Girls Go to Heaven, Bad Girls Go Everywhere,” was the motto on Brown’s wall.
The American dream of a self-made woman and the practical Goddess of love
Brown was the “practical Goddess of love to ordinary women,” said Gail Sheehy at The Daily Beast, who said Brown “liberated the minds of millions of homely, working-class girls stuck in hardscrabble towns across America” and challenged them to “take the same liberties as young men: to enjoy a long and lusty sexual prelude to marriage and to use the rest of the time to build a successful career.”
Sheehy, who knew Brown since the sixties, described her as “the American dream of a self-made woman … What she lacked in money for higher education she made up for in hard work and self-discipline, bucking the sexist workplace of the 1950s and ’60s by starting as a secretary and toiling through 17 jobs before she achieved her dream of becoming an editor, at the age of 42.”
“Having a man is 50 percent of living,” Brown counseled. “Never refuse to make love, even if you don’t feel like it,” she recommended in her 1982 best seller, Having It All.
America’s most puritanical wild woman
Slate reproduced a 2000 profile of Brown in which David Plotz described her as “America’s most puritanical wild woman.” “In the popular imagination, Helen Gurley Brown is a Holly Golightly character, an insouciant cutie-pie, existentially concerned with having a good time. But the ultimate Cosmo girl is actually a different sort of American icon: the ruthless, self-made woman. She is Sister Carrie, channeled through Bridget Jones,” insisted Plotz, who said “The Cosmo girl’s dirty little secret isn’t sex. It’s work.”
“Cosmo was Erin Brockovich before Erin Brockovich: Dress like a slut, work like a champ,” said David Plotz at Slate.