AS I STARTED OUT ON WOMEN'S glossy magazines in 1997, Helen Gurley Brown retired as editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan, age 75. Or rather she was "retired" by the Hearst Corporation, embarrassed that their figurehead was now 50 years older than Cosmo's
readership. How we laughed at the absurdity. For us, the skeletal, face-lifted Brown was a joke figure. Well now, I'm ashamed. Reading Jennifer Scanlon's Bad Girls Go Everywhere, I realise she was a key feminist icon.
She made conservative America see that women were sexual, desirous creatures, just like men. She was the original Carrie Bradshaw. When her book Sex and the Single Girl came out in 1961 – a year before Betty Friedan's feminist bible, The Feminine Mystique – it made the lives of single women seem smart and glamorous. Forget the rat race to the altar: all you needed was a sex life and a bank account.
She herself didn't marry until the age of 37. You sense it took some nerve. But then Helen Gurley Brown was her own creation. While many feminists were middle class, Brown was working class. She knew the importance of money. And her attitude to love was libertarian. According to Brown, women could, using their bodies in addition to their brains, manipulate the system that manipulated them. Later in her writing she advised young women how to get married lovers to pay for liquor, stockings, even an apartment. Hilarious stuff – unless, of course, she stole your husband.
But then, Helen started out with zilch. Plain, acne-ridden, she was the girl least likely to succeed. Her father died when she was ten; her sister caught polio. Helen excelled at school but it was never enough to please her passive-aggressive mother. There was no chance of university. She became a secretary, supporting her mother and disabled sister. In her lunch hour she wrote advertising copy, eventually becoming the most highly paid female copywriter on the West Coast.
She had many lovers but never a relationship with an equal – until she met producer David Brown. A divorcé, he had no desire to remarry. It took her two years of cunning. Helen played the dutiful wife, but he encouraged her career, helping her write Sex and the Single Girl and launch herself as an editor.
Aged 43, in 1965, she was appointed editor of Cosmo (a fading women's title) and proceeded to sex it up with articles about the Pill, married men and how to get ahead in your career. It became a sensation, with its blonde cover girl and can-do journalism. Brown knew her reader – she was that woman. She was one of the first editors to see lesbianism as a valid choice. To understand that women need a job – for money, independence and to meet decent men. She refused to promote the woman-as-victim school of thought. And she loved femininity – seeing it as mysterious, intuitive and inherently powerful. Yes, Cosmo eventually became a parody of itself ("Cleavage feminism", sneered the critics). Many second-wave feminists despaired of what they saw as Brown's immature attitude to men. But for all her shock tactics, her aim was always the same: to help young, working and ambitious single women.
In an era of demos and dungarees, she didn't get full credit. So Scanlon, a professor in gender and women studies, is to be applauded for her revisionist approach. The book moves at a cracking pace and is mercifully free of academic jargon. There are fascinating parallels between Brown's own career and authors such as Jacqueline Susann. Scanlon also plots the rise of the single girl on TV – from Mary Tyler Moore to Sex and the City.
But the book is no hagiography. Miserly to the end (Brown recycled presents for staff), she dieted to deprivation. She didn't do children (her stepson who died of a drug addiction was one of her few failures). She was an unapologetic capitalist. And although she campaigned for abortion, she was more interested in self-help than social change.
But she never manipulated other women. And she was remarkably generous to rivals – once sending Gloria Steinem, at Ms, a huge cheque to bail out the title.
With verve, clout and humour, Brown transformed herself from shy "mouseburger" to New York diva. She put the single woman on the map. She made work seem thrilling (at 85, she's still a consultant for Hearst). And she knew sexual pleasure was never trivial. How can you not love a woman who declared: "Welcoming a penis just seems a more womanly thing to do than baking chocolate chip cookies or doling out money for a grandchild's college trust fund."
Today her mantra – dress well, make the most of yourself – looks more convincing to third-wave feminists who see no contradiction between lusting after a frock and campaigning for equal pay. We owe her a tremendous debt. She simply wanted women to feel at home in their bodies. And she wanted them to have fulfilling love – at any age.
