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Singles Girls Biography

Helen Gurley Brown, the author of “Sex and the Single Girl” (1962) and for three decades the editor of Cosmopolitan, was born in Green Forest, Ark., a tiny town in the Ozark Mountains. Her father died when she was 10; her sister had polio; her family was “hillbilly,” she wrote, and poor. Once she got out, she looked back only by force of will. She liked to quote a line from Carson McCullers: “I must go home periodically to renew my sense of horror.”

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Courtesy of Helen Gurley Brown

Helen Gurley Brown in the art department at Cosmopolitan, shortly after she took over as editor of the magazine in 1965.

BAD GIRLS GO EVERYWHERE

The Life of Helen Gurley Brown

By Jennifer Scanlon

Illustrated. 270 pages. Oxford University Press. $27.95.

Bad Girls, Good Sense: A Helen Gurley Brown Quiz (May 24, 2009)

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Courtesy of Helen Gurley Brown

Helen Gurley Brown with her husband, David Brown.

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Courtesy of Helen Gurley Brown

Ms. Brown and the publisher John Mack Carter, left, at a 1990 party celebrating her 25th anniversary as Cosmopolitan editor.

Roxanne Ashley

Jennifer Scanlon

Ms. Brown’s background lighted a kind of fire beneath her; it allowed her to speak effortlessly, later in her life, to the fears and aspirations of America’s often ignored working-class women. She would write, defining her scrappy brand of Horatio Alger feminism: “If you have some daily anguish from some cause that’s not really your fault — a rotten family, bad health, nowhere looks, serious money problems, nobody to help you, minority background (I don’t have that — a WASP — but I had other things), rejoice! These things are your fuel!”

In her entertaining new biography of Ms. Brown, “Bad Girls Go Everywhere,” Jennifer Scanlon, a professor of gender and women’s studies at Bowdoin College, charts her subject’s rocketlike rise out of the Ozarks. She also argues, convincingly, for Ms. Brown as a feisty, pivotal and too easily dismissed pioneer of the American women’s movement, one who dismayed more serious feminists with her breezy tone, her refusal to see men as the enemy and her belief that sex is not only great fun but also a “powerful weapon” for single women.

Ms. Brown belongs alongside figures like Betty Friedan in histories of second-wave feminism (even if Friedan would have squirmed at the idea), Ms. Scanlon writes, and was a precursor of the third-wave, “Sex and the City” feminism. Born in 1922, Helen Gurley Brown escaped Arkansas when her mother moved the family, briefly, to Los Angeles. Never a great beauty, Ms. Brown developed a presence, Ms. Scanlon writes. “She eventually came to realize that success and power produced their own beauty.” She was popular and valedictorian of her high school senior class.

When her family returned to the Ozarks, Ms. Brown stayed put. She skipped college and worked as a secretary in 17 different offices during the mid-1940s. The professional playing field was desperately unequal: men were paid far more than women, and there were few opportunities to advance professionally. Living by her wits, Ms. Brown learned to game the system.

She slept with some of her bosses, and dated both Jack Dempsey and Ron Getty, son of the oil tycoon J. Paul Getty. (“A lady’s love should pay for all trips, most restaurant tabs and all liquor,” she later advised.)

She instinctively knew, however, as she would later counsel other women: “You can’t sleep your way to the top or even to the middle, and there is no such thing as a free lunch. You have to do it yourself, so you might as well get started.” Within a few years she landed a job at an advertising agency and became the most highly paid female copywriter on the West Coast. In 1959, when she was 37, she married David Brown, an older, twice-married film producer. It was his idea that she write “Sex and the Single Girl,” but it was her bright, no-nonsense voice that brought the book to life.

The early 1960s was not a cheerful time for single women in America; they were viewed with pity if not outright suspicion. As Ms. Brown put it, the prevailing attitude was: “If you were female and not married by age 30, you might as well go to the Grand Canyon and throw yourself in.” Ms. Brown knew, the author writes, that single women “wanted to feel good about rather than ashamed of the life choices they made or contemplated.” The single girl, she proclaimed, “is a giver, not a taker, a winner and not a loser.

Singles Girls