Helen Gurley Brown
I just got the assignment to review the book, Bad Girls Go Everywhere: The Life of Helen Gurley Brown. Before she became well known as the editor of Cosmo magazine, Helen Gurley Brown had a popular column for single women that ran in the women’s pages.
This photo is of Helen from 1964. Newspapers across the country ran Helen Gurley Brown’s column, “The Woman Alone” in the 1960s. Her 1962 book, Sex and the Single Girl, had caused a sensation. The book encouraged women’s independence – and a little contradiction thrown in. For example, she advises that a woman have an apartment of her own and that she have a job that interests her. Yet, she also advises that she have not an ounce of “baby fat.” While the argument has been made that much of the advice was based on attracting a man’s attention, it should also be noted that the advice did encourage women to be economically independent and aware of current events.
Her newspaper column encouraged similar independence. In a 1963 column that ran in the Miami News, a reader who was a widow wrote that her children were angry with her because she had turned down a marriage proposal. Gurley Brown encouraged the widow to stand her ground. She wrote: “As for her children, they’ll have no choice but to have their teeth recapped when they grind them down over this mother who may sound frivolous but who very much knows her own mind.”
