Helen Gurley Brown

American publisher and author

• Date of birth: February 18, 1922
• Place of birth: Green Forest, Arkansas
• Date of death: August 13, 2012
• Place of death: Manhattan, New York

In more than three decades as the powerful and charismatic editor of Cosmopolitan magazine, and as the author of the phenomenal 1962 best seller Sex and the Single Girl, Brown redefined the cultural perception of single women and became, in turn, one of the most provocative voices of mid-twentieth century sexual politics.

Early Life

Helen Gurley Brown was born Helen Gurley to parents who were schoolteachers in the small town of Green Forest, Arkansas, a rural crossroads along the Missouri border. Her father died when she was young and the family relocated to Little Rock, Arkansas. Brown was a voracious reader and recalled later the impact of the novel Gone with the Wind (1936), and its charismatic character, Scarlett O’Hara, who uses her wits as well as her beauty and her sexuality to access social and economic success. O’Hara became the prototype of what became the “Cosmo girl,” Brown’s conception in restructuring Cosmopolitan magazine in the early 1960s.

Brown also was an inveterate letter writer, in part because of the family’s relocation, but more because she was drawn to the intimacy and immediacy of letter writing. Unlike the flowery prose of her library books, letters were concise, unadorned, and practical—all elements that later defined her own writing style.

After completing high school, and with no interest in the domestic life, Brown pursued a career in office management. She attended Texas State College for Women (now Texas Woman’s University) in Denton from 1939 to 1941, then transferred to Woodbury Business College (now Woodbury University) in Burbank, California. Eager to enter the business world, she left school early. After two jobs as an executive secretary, she accepted a position in the mail room of a prestigious Los Angeles advertising agency. When an executive took notice of her crisp and concise writing style, he offered her work as a copywriter. Within ten years, Brown was the most highly paid advertising account executive in the lucrative West Coast market.

In 1959, at age thirty-seven, Brown married David Brown, a film producer. In no time, David came upon copies of nearly twenty years of Helen’s letters to friends. Impressed by the letters’ candor and their agreeable writing style, he also saw in them a kind of narrative of the experience of women under age forty who did not embrace the conventional life of marriage and children. He encouraged Helen to organize the letters into a manuscript, geared to providing women with a guide to career and financial planning, beauty and fashion, diet and exercise, friendships, and—most provocatively for the late 1950s and early 1960s—dating and sexuality. This advice book, Sex and the Single Girl (1962), became an international best seller, arguing that single women should embrace their lives, relish their freedom, celebrate their sexuality, and pursue independence through career success. Oddly, the 1964 film version of the book, which starred Natalie Wood as a psychologist counseling an eccentric cast of West Coast neurotics, degenerated into a cheesy “sexcapade.” Brown’s book, however, sought to empower a considerable segment of the population with a vital message of self-reliance.

Life’s Work

Brown was convinced she had staked out a potentially significant demographic. The success of Sex and the Single Girl (and Sex and the Office, 1965) made her an international celebrity and increased her financial resources. Brown soon approached Hearst Corporation with a prospectus for a magazine that would target single women and offer advice on a range of lifestyle issues, including sex. Hearst, however, was uneasy about beginning an entirely new publication. Nevertheless, Hearst offered Brown the editorship of one of the company’s smaller publications, Cosmopolitan, at one time a prestigious Midwestern literary magazine.

In its heyday in the 1940s, Cosmopolitan published the experimental fiction of Ernest Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, and John Steinbeck, and the prairie poetry of Vachel Lindsay and Carl Sandburg. By the time Brown accepted the offer in 1965, the magazine had devolved into a typical women’s magazine of the 1960s, catering to housewives and mothers. Brown immediately overhauled the magazine’s format and introduced her ideal reader: the so-called Cosmo girl, a bright, sexy, confident single woman intent on career success, relationship freedom, a dazzling appearance, and complete self-determination.

Under Brown’s direction, the magazine defined the lifestyle of the hip single woman. It explored a range of issues that touched frankly on sexual subjects previously taboo in women’s magazines: adultery, office affairs, divorce, abortion, and sex. The magazine did much more, though. In validating the single life for women under age forty, it shaped a generation of women just beginning to explore life beyond domesticity. Cosmopolitan offered practical advice on home repairs and provided recipes for quick meals for women whose careers demanded their time. It broke new ground by introducing healthy lifestyle and diet choices so that women could pursue the hectic pace of fast-track success. The magazine endorsed cosmetic surgery, stylish (rather than extravagant) wardrobes, and savvy financial investment.

Cosmopolitan’s circulation grew exponentially with Brown at the helm. Most sales were made at newsstands because receiving the magazine in the mail was still considered shocking. Women responded to the magazine’s upbeat affirmation of the single lifestyle, the honest presentation of practical issues that had immediate impact on their lives, and the significant space dedicated each month to responding to readers’ letters (possibly reflecting Brown’s love of epistolary communication).

Given its uncompromising endorsement of the liberal lifestyle, and its shockingly candid approach to sexuality, Cosmopolitan inevitably drew comparisons to Hugh Hefner’s Playboy. Although Brown eschewed the nudity of Playboy, Cosmopolitan covers regularly featured scantily clad models (many of whom used the cover as a springboard to international fame). One of its most notorious (and successful) issues in the mid-1970s featured a nude centerfold of actor Burt Reynolds. Brown tirelessly defended her magazine’s liberal views on sexuality and vehemently denied endorsing promiscuity. She insisted that sexuality was a necessary and vital part of any woman’s identity and personal growth. Her approach worked under her editorial direction, which lasted more than thirty years—Cosmopolitan ranked consistently in the top ten in newsstand sales and circulation.

By the late 1990s the communication industry had changed, and so had cultural mores. Brown left her role as the US editor of Cosmopolitan in 1997; however, she remained the editor of all international editions of the magazine until her death in 2012. Several factors played a part in these changes, including increasingly conservative attitudes about sexuality led, in part, by a rise in political conservatism and by the influence of religion. Women were succeeding in the corporate structure, and magazine sales began to fall with the rise in popularity of the Internet.

Ultimately, Brown was recognized not so much for her belief in the you-can-have-it-all Cosmo lifestyle but for her meticulous and energetic direction of Cosmopolitan. She was a model of the driven and savvy entrepreneur in a field long dominated by men publishing magazines for men. Brown died on August 13, 2012, in Manhattan at the age of ninety.

Significance

Through nearly forty years of writing and editing, Brown argued a kind of feminism radically out of sync with the wider feminist movements of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Indeed, leading feminists criticized Brown and dismissed the Cosmo-girl lifestyle as an aggressive materialism and consumerism that demeaned women by validating them largely through their sexuality. In turn, they argued, this validation encouraged unmitigated narcissism. Furthermore, many feminists criticized Brown for abdicating social and political activism on behalf of women and for endorsing instead a superficial sense of glamour and ideal beauty.

Many argue, however, that the feminist movement of the 1970s would have found little audience had Brown not helped to empower women nearly a decade earlier with her pioneering restructuring of Cosmopolitan. The magazine, and Brown, believed women could grow and succeed as individuals in the traditionally masculine and male-focused worlds of work and sex. Drawing on her background as an advertising executive, Brown audaciously shaped a hip, attractive message that defined women as far more complex than the women depicted in the majority of the media. She introduced into the definition of femininity questions of sexual need, material success, career advancement, and emotional well being.

Brown was also an active philanthropist. She donated a total of $30 million in 2012. Of that, $18 million went to the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and $12 million to the Stanford School of Engineering, to establish the David and Helen Gurley Brown Institute for Media Innovation—a joint research initiative between the two universities.

Bibliography

Brown, Helen Gurley. Having It All: Success, Sex, and Money, Even If You’re Starting with Nothing. New York: Simon, 1982. Print.

Fox, Margalit. "Helen Gurley Brown, Who Gave 'Single Girls' a Life in Full, Dies at 90." New York Times. New York Times, 14 Aug. 2012. Web. 10 Dec. 2013.

Freedman, Estelle. No Turning Back: The History of Feminism and the Future of Women. New York: Ballantine, 2003. Print.

Gough-Yates, Ann. Understanding Women’s Magazines: Publishing, Markets, and Readership. New York: Routledge, 2003. Print.

Hunt, Paula D. "Editing Desire, Working Girl Wisdom, and Cupcakeable Goodness." Journalism History 38.3 (2012): 130–41. Print.

Kitch, Carolyn. The Girl on the Magazine Cover: The Origins of Visual Stereotypes in American Mass Media. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina, 2000. Print.

Rosen, Ruth. The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America. New York: Penguin, 2001. Print.

Rosman, Katherine. "Who Owns Helen Gurley Brown's Legacy?" New York Times. New York Times, 22 Aug. 2015. Web. 29 Sept. 2015.

Scanlon, Jennifer. Bad Girls Go Everywhere: The Life of Helen Gurley Brown, The Woman Behind Cosmopolitan Magazine. New York: Penguin, 2010. Print.

Wolf, Naomi. The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women. New York: Harper, 2002. Print.