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The Ultimate Cosmo Girl

© Megan Drummond

Helen Gurley Brown was perhaps the most influential woman of the ‘60s, some say the century, and she did it all with her pen. From her bestselling book Sex and the Single Girl to her work as Editor-in-Chief of Cosmo, Helen changed the way women look at the world and the way the world looks at women.

Helen Gurley was born in Green Forest, Arkansas in 1922. Both of her parents were schoolteachers and Helen had one sister. Helen’s father was killed in an automobile accident when she was a young girl and her sister contracted polio at 19.

Helen began her career as a secretary for an ad agency in the 1950s. Her boss was suitably impressed with Helen’s well-written and entertaining letters, and Helen soon found herself in the copywriting department. She became one of the highest paid copywriters in the country in the early 1960s.

In 1962, at the urging of her husband – prominent movie producer David Brown – Helen wrote and published Sex and the Single Girl, which stayed on the bestseller list until late 1963 and became a 1964 move starring Natalie Wood. In 1965, also at the urging of David, Helen took the helm of the then-struggling Cosmopolitan magazine. For the next 32 years she instructed, helped, advised, cheered for, encouraged, liberated, and promoted women, giving them new role models to emulate and a new manual for the sexual revolution. She was a powerful voice advocating women's sexual freedom -- armed with the pill, she showed women how they could use it, how they could take advantage of it, how they could thrive with the new technology, the new attitudes of the '60s, and the new control they had over their sexual destinies.

Helen left from her position at Cosmo in New York in 1997, at the age of 73, to oversee all of the international editions of the magazine, including Russia, Taiwan, the Czech Republic and Mexico – 36 in all. She now spends her time flying from one exotic city to the next, bringing the Cosmo philosophy to the locals. She has also continued to write books, with her latest published in 1998.

In what would seem an ironic twist to some people, the icon of single women everywhere, Helen Gurley Brown has been happily married now for over 40 years – to the same man.

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