Bad Girls Go Everywhere: The Life of Helen Gurley Brown, the Woman Behind Cosmopolitan Magazine

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Bad Girls Go Everywhere: The Life of Helen Gurley Brown, the Woman Behind Cosmopolitan Magazine  
Badgirls.jpg
Author(s) Jennifer Scanlon
Publisher Penguin Books
Publication date 2009
Pages 285
ISBN 978-0-19-534205-5

In the only biographical work on a notable feminist before Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique in 1963, Bowdoin College professor, Jennifer Scanlon, gives readers an in-depth look surrounding Helen Gurley Brown- the “woman behind Cosmopolitan Magazine.” With a great deal of research and scavenging around Helen Gurley Brown’s personal papers in the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College, a women’s college in Massachusetts, Scanlon writes a personal memoir behind the life and success of Helen Gurley Brown, while also arguing that Brown was indeed the pioneer of the second wave of feminism. In contrast to Betty Friedan’s audience in the Feminine Mystique in 1963, Helen Gurley Brown published the controversial, yet popular book, Sex and the Single Girl a year prior in 1962. Scanlon argues that Helen Brown reached a different group of women and feminists; a group that doesn’t get enough credit.

Scanlon writes, “Brown’s particular version of feminism, more likely practiced by single women than by housewives, and by working-class secretaries rather than middle-class students, has largely been left out of established histories of postwar feminism’s emergence and ascendance. Yet Helen Gurley Brown was there from the start, documenting and promoting the beliefs and practices of the sexy single girl, who challenged the status quo with her unrelenting presence, her sexual and economic desires, and her refusal to give in to the dictates of postwar domesticity” (x-xi).

In chapter one, “Growing up Gurley, and a Girl,” Scanlon investigates the foundations of Brown’s life prior to her success. Having grown up in the depression era in a small town in Arkansas, Brown understood from the beginning that she did not belong in this rural setting. She “never felt proud of the people or the places she came from, and once she left Arkansas, she never returned there to live” (10). Sadly, her Father, Ira, died when Helen was very young, so she grew up with her Mother, Cleo, as the widow taking on huge responsibilities in working and providing for both Brown and her little sister, Mary. Even though Brown resented her Mother a great deal throughout her life for all of the bitterness following Ira’s death, she eventually grew to respect her as her Mother took on the roles as a parent and sole provider.

When both daughters were becoming of age, Cleo decided to take them and head west to Los Angeles, California, where Ira once lived. Sadly, Mary developed polio while renting out a small two-bedroom apartment, so they moved to a bungalow near Los Angeles’s orthopedic hospital (13-14). While Mary received multiple treatments and muscle transplants, Brown supported her family but was receiving a fan base within her high school. Even though Brown had a very low self-esteem, she found herself very popular among her high school students at John H. Francis Polytechnic High School. While she never defined herself as “beautiful,” she more or less discovered that all of her success and praise from students around her boosted her confidence and made her feel sexy. Scanlon writes, “Like many women of her generation and after, she eventually came to realize that success and power produced their own beauty” (18). The first chapter ends with Brown’s success at Woodbury College- a secretarial school. After graduation, Brown bounced from secretarial job to secretarial job throughout Los Angeles, as her Mother and sister moved back to Arkansas. Brown stayed and enjoyed her single life of work and play.

Following in chapter two, “Work Life, Romantic Entanglements,” Brown continued to enjoy her status as a secretary and quickly discovered how sexual relationships with bosses at work can sometimes help a sexy, confident woman reach the top. Eventually, she worked her way into a position as an executive secretary to Don Belding of Foote, Cone, and Belding, an advertising agency in Los Angeles. It was during this time when Brown developed a huge interest in writing and public relations. Furthermore, she considered herself a professional, but she understood that the males still dominated the work industry and there was no way she was able to break through the glass ceiling anytime soon (28).

While chapter two discusses her secretarial jobs throughout Los Angeles, chapter three, titled, “David Brown” discusses her long-awaited marriage and concrete plans of domestic roles that she despised for so long before the age of thirty-seven. After years of sexual relationships and the carefree lifestyle of being single during her twenties and early thirties, Brown decided she needed to settle down. She was ready for a long-term commitment to a “man of substance” (42). Eventually, her friends set her up with David Brown, a film studio executive and successful copyright. Although she was new to domesticity and firm commitment to a man, she and David would prove a perfect combination of an everlasting marriage- they both appreciated each other’s independence, confidence, and aspirations.

Following with chapters four and five, Scanlon emphasizes an extreme height in Brown’s career when she published Sex and the Single Girl in 1962. This publication was more or less a nonfiction guide to being a single and enjoying the pleasures of free sexual relationships and independence in the workplace. Brown took a huge leap and publicized the realities of sex in 1962, which was controversial at the time as she pointed out the sexual relationships between married men and single women. Although she was bashed by many critics, the book was a huge success. It was a male-dominated approach where Brown pointed that using sex and money for feminine power was deemed highly successful. Scanlon writes, “In Sex and the Single Girl, single women can refuse to marry if it isn’t right for them, refrain from buying into outmoded definitions of female sexuality, find work they feel passionate about and find meaning in, enliven their domestic surroundings to meet their needs, and enjoy being women under what Brown would consider fairly liberated conditions” (82).

Chapter six, “Sexy from the Start” surrounds Scanlon’s main argument as naming Brown the earliest and lead pioneer in the second wave of feminism. She argues that too many scholars assume Betty Friedan the leader of the second wave of feminism with her 1963 publication, The Feminine Mystique, but Scanlon believes otherwise with proof in the 1962 publication Sex and the Single Girl which appeared well before Friedan. Following the stark contrasts and few comparisons between Brown and Friedan, Scanlon discusses the ways in which Brown promoted Sex and the Single Girl in the world market until 1965 in chapter seven.

In chapter eight, “Normal Like Me,” Scanlon analyzes the role of single women in television and how it truly did not occur until the groundbreaking series, “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” However, Brown pushed for a television series much like the Mary Tyler Moore show throughout the 1960s. She wanted to celebrate single women in a situation comedy, but this appreciation would not happen until the 1970s. Scanlon writes, “Television producers had not yet begun to think of single women either as credible characters or as an advertising demographic worth pitching programs to,” but Brown would push for her own sitcom “The Single Girl Sandra,” until she was offered a huge opportunity at Cosmopolitan in 1965 (140, 144).

The heart of the book for Scanlon would be life as editor of Cosmopolitan and feminist advocate in the second and third waves, promoting sexual rights with abortion and birth control in chapters nine through eleven. With Cosmopolitan, Brown needed “to devise a more efficient means of connecting with her constituency” (150). With that in mind, she addressed single, even married women individually and empowered the “Cosmo Girl” by reporting on their sexual, hardworking, and independent lifestyles, not advocating it (152). Once a magazine looking at bankruptcy, Brown turned the entire publication around and instilled the strategies that continues to make Cosmopolitan one of the leading magazines for women to this day. In the final chapter, “An Editor Steps Down, Reluctantly,” Scanlon concludes on the reasons why Brown stepped down as editor of Cosmopolitan. After thirty-two years at Cosmo, Brown witnessed the emergence of other magazines that empowered the same “sex-friendly” views, like Glamour and Seventeen (222). After a great deal of time as editor, Brown believed it was appropriate to resign. However, as the current leading editor of Cosmopolitan International, she is still promoting her own wave of feminism today, and there are “Cosmo Girls” everywhere who continue to embrace their individuality, sexuality, and confidence in and out of the work place.


Jennifer Scanlon, Bad Girls Go Everywhere: The Live of Helen Gurley Brown, the Woman Behind Cosmopolitan Magazine (New York: Penguin Books, 2009).