Bad Girls Go Everywhere: The Life of Helen Gurley Brown
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When reviewing the great figures of feminism, few would call to mind the creator of the Cosmo Girl, but as Jennifer Scanlon argues in her fascinating biography Bad Girls Go Everywhere: The Life of Helen Gurley Brown, the longtime editor of Cosmopolitan and diva of the New York magazine world powerfully changed the way modern culture views the single woman. From Brown's first book, Sex and the Single Girl, a bold precursor to today's unapologetic Sex in the City, to her editing of the most widely read women's magazine in the world, Brown defied traditional mores to proclaim the unmarried woman's right to happiness. The first woman to publicly say there was another role available in the conservative context of the 1960s, Brown offered American women a revelation that resulted in a revolution. Scanlon tracks the trajectory of Brown's career as a frank, fearless champion for women, from her support for abortion rights to her demands that freedom of choice for women include everything from fashion to politics, showing how Brown has advocated for women while achieving great commercial success. The first to focus on Helen Gurley Brown, Scanlon's intriguing biography accords Brown a place among the early leaders of the second wave of the feminist movement. In Bad Girls Go Everywhere, Scanlon's impressively researched portrait shows us that Helen Gurley Brown is a woman of fascinating contradictions, carving out her own unique philosophy of pragmatic feminism, a philosophy that defines the lives of millions of women today. Scanlon's perceptive account of this shrewd public figure tracks the collision between sexual politics and commerce, providing new insight into the social forces that shape modern life. To read it is to better understand how feminism operates in our day-to-day lives.The Barnes & Noble ReviewFeminism, you'd think, needs Helen Gurley Brown like a fish needs a bicycle. In 1970, feminists staged a sit-in at Cosmopolitan magazine -- its cover famed for "man-pleasing!" taglines and necklines -- demanding that editor-in-chief Brown use her glossy platform to advocate for women's liberation. Brown's response? To defend her magazine as "already feminist," writes women's studies prof Jennifer Scanlon in Bad Girls Go Everywhere: The Life of Helen Gurley Brown. Indeed, Scanlon posits Brown -- convincingly -- as a provocative pioneer of feminism's second wave: Brown's version, "more likely practiced by single women than by housewives, and by working-class secretaries than middle-class college students, has largely been left out of established histories of postwar feminism's emergence and ascendance." Brown, for starters, did use her platform to support the ERA, abortion rights, and contraception (and tried, unsuccessfully, to make her writing lesbian-friendly). Her feminism -- its bible: Brown's blockbuster Sex and the Single Girl -- was not a vision of matriarchal utopia but a clear-eyed, if eyelash-batting, look at 1960s reality and its hostility to "career" and single women. Brown was "messianic" about work -- not men -- as the source of women's fulfillment, if not survival. Rather than overturn the sexist system, Brown said, work it. Cleavage at the office? Let's face it: that's how you keep your job. Unlike Cosmo, Bad Girls is not a breezy read, but it's a well-researched corrective that puts "lipstick feminism" in its proper, valuable -- and colorful -- place in modern women's history. --Lynn Harris
1 Growing Up Gurley, and a Girl 12 Work Life, Romantic Entanglements 233 David Brown 404 Sex and the Single Girl 575 Sensationalist Literature and Expert Advice: Selling Sex and the Single Girl 796 Sexy From the Start: The Early Years of Second-Wave Feminism 947 Packaging a Message - And a Messenger 1128 Normal Like Me: The Single Girl on Television 1329 Good Girls Go to Heaven - Bad Girls Go Everywhere: Helen Gurley Brown's Cosmopolitan 14310 Sexual Liberation on Whose Terms?: Defining the Second Wave 16811 Aging, Resisting, Redefining 19212 An Editor Steps Down, Reluctantly 212Acknowledgments 226Notes 229Index 263
