BIOGRAPHY: Bad Girls Go Everywhere: The Life of Helen Gurley Brown By Jennifer ScanlonOxford University Press, 288pp $27.95
ONE OF the first features I ever had the privilege of hammering out for this newspaper was on the concept of the "Cosmo Girl" as lauded in the pages of Cosmopolitan, an ageing Hearst title that under the astute editorship of Helen Gurley Brown had begun sweeping all before it.
It was the first mass-market glossy for a brand new species: women with sex lives and bank accounts of their own, for whom work was not merely a prelude to their true vocation as wives and mothers but an integral part of their identity. Once upon a time that was a radical point of view.
"The single career woman may find satisfaction in her job," warned Lifemagazine in 1956, "but the chances are that she will suffer psychological damage. Should she marry and reproduce, her husband and children will be profoundly unhappy." And it was that 1950s mindset that Helen so insouciantly challenged when she published Sex and The Single Girlin 1962.
Reading Scanlon's biography it becomes glaringly obvious that even though her influence via Cosmopolitan'scirculation was enormous, and indeed much envied by magazines like Msand Spare Rib, it was far from second-wave feminism young Helen Gurley's consciousness was formed.
Growing up in the Great Depression and with no obvious prospects, she was determined, in true American style, to make something of her life, despite, or more likely because of, who she was and where she hailed from. In the preface she stated:
“I am not beautiful or even pretty. I once had the world’s worse case of acne. I am not bosomy or brilliant. I grew up in a small town. I didn’t go to college. My family was, and is, desperately poor, and I have always helped support them. I’m an introvert and am sometimes mean and cranky”.
Despite the girly prose and profoundly irritating style, there followed a manifesto in favour of female independence both sexual and economic that rocked the publishing world and went on to be sold in 35 countries.
Work was the key to autonomy and Brown made no bones about that. “I am messianic on the subject,” she wrote. “Use your own guts and energy to improve yourself, your job, your intellect, and every other possible thing. You can’t sleep your way to the top or even the middle, and there is no such thing as a free lunch. You have to do it yourself so you may as well get started.”
Aged 40 when it first appeared, she had worked her own way laboriously up the ladder and yes that ladder included a rung marked “marriage”, but only to a man who would fit the bill, and in the meantime, she argued that single women could live on their own and enjoy whatever emotional benefits that might come their way, including – shock horror – explore sex with married men.
She articulated the coming revolution when she wrote of her own time: “If you were female and not married by aged thirty, you might as well go to the Grand Canyon and throw yourself in. If you were having sex and not married, don’t bother with the Grand Canyon, just go to the kitchen, put your head in the oven and turn on the gas”.
Or as her biographer puts it: “She exposed as inherently flawed the reigning set of rules about intimate relationships that its proponents touted as uniquely American, valuable and suited to all”.
Since the book was immediately seen to promote sex for purposes other than that of procreation, hot stuff in those days, it was, needless to remark, banned in Ireland.
Scanlon’s lucid take on the role HGB played in “women’s lib” long before the phrase came into vogue is immensely refreshing and goes a long way to counterbalance the mockery the poor woman has subsequently endured, mostly to do with her frugal habits and die-hard commitment to keep on working ’til the day she drops.
Though rich as Croesus at 86 and still acting editor of CosmopolitanInternational, she carried to work "home-made tuna salad in a used yoghurt container inside a well-worn brown paper bag".
The vilification began when she launched " Cosmo" in the 1970s. In reply to a diatribe levelled against her by Betty Friedan, who accused her of refusing to subscribe to the full feminist agenda she said: "The girl I'm editing for is the one who wants to achieve, who wants to be known for herself. If that's not a feminist message I don't know what is".
However the sisterhood did not approve of displayed femininity with the object of being perceived as desirable by the opposite sex. Put more baldly, the plunging cleavage on the covers, and the eyes and lips aglow with the promise of eternal youth didn't cut it for Kate Millet et al.Nor did the blurbs or "emotionally charged messages" that her husband, film producer David Brown (who numbers Jawsamong his production credits), crafted so provocatively each month.
Friedan’s argument that emphasising “femininity” infantilised women into passive reflections of their true selves was to misunderstand Brown, according to Scanlon. Her emphasis on self-improvement and the use of the playful elements of femininity was not trashing the sisterhood but squeezing the assets.
“Helen’s point was that women could, using their bodies as well as their brains, manipulate the system that manipulated them.”
Not a politically correct approach these days I grant you, and she was no intellectual theorist, but the self-confessed “mouseburger” is now 87, only two years younger than my own mother, whose generation appears to have inhabited another planet altogether. Hard to credit it was a woman of her vintage who first began loosening the bolts from within. Scanlon’s biography, both scholarly and readable, is an excellent treatise on the subject.
Jeananne Crowley is an actor and writer