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Why do we love Helen?
The brave new world of the 1960s signaled a lot of changes for everyone and a lot of uncertainty about sexual roles. While Hugh Hefner's Playboy ideal showed men how to live the high life, there was a sassy new woman who burst on the scene, telling women they could have the same. Helen Gurley Brown's 1962 book Sex and the Single Girl was a boon to a whole new generation of women who were entering the workforce and trying to learn to navigate career, love, and sex in the new era of permissiveness ushered in by the changing times and the pill. She urged women to enjoy their single lives to the hilt, to find fulfillment through their own means, and to define themselves rather than let a husband do it.
Raised poor in Arkansas, Helen managed to attend college and honed her sharp writing style as an award-winning advertising copywriter. She married film producer David Brown at the age of 37, and three years later published her groundbreaking tome. Sex and the Single Girl was outrageously successful, selling 150,000 hardcover copies in less than a year, becoming a film starring Natalie Wood in 1964, and garnering Helen fame as the outspoken face of the "new woman." In 1965, Helen and her husband drew up a proposal for a magazine that would appeal to the single career woman between the ages of 18 and 34. The Hearst Company bought the idea and handed over its floundering publication Cosmopolitan. Helen was made editor-in-chief, the Cosmo Girl and her motto "Fun. Fearless. Female." was born, and circulation soared to three million.
Though Helen's message, that a woman could be sexy, glamorous, and strong, was at odds with much militant feminism of the '70s, the magazine and Helen continued to thrive. Many women seeking some balance between retaining their femininity and battling discrimination took her example to heart. She wrote several more successful books and continued to edit Cosmopolitan until she retired in 1997. Whether one is a fan of the latest incarnation of the magazine, there is no doubt of the iconic status of Cosmopolitan, the Cosmo Girl, and Helen Gurley Brown.
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In her own words -- On her feminism in the '60s:
"I said you could be a practicing female—a sexual person, a feminine person—and you could actually like men. Men were not the enemy—some of them were, but not all of them. You could pay attention to how you looked and take pride in the way you looked and still be a feminist. A feminist wants the best for both sexes and doesn't want either sex to be discriminated against. You don't want anybody to be kept from doing what he or she wants to do just because of his or her sex."
On proper rewards:
"You can have your titular recognition. I'll take money and power."
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