Bad Girls Go Everywhere: The Life of Helen Gurley Brown. Jennifer Scanlon. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. 288 pp.
Several years ago, a bright Women’s Studies minor in my journalism history course asked if she could do her paper on Helen Gurley Brown and why some young feminists read (often secretly) Cosmopolitan magazine. I was perplexed. Like many women who came of age in the aftermath of “second-wave” feminism, I had dismissed both Cosmo and Brown, its longtime editor and author of the 1962 shocker, Sex and the Single Girl, as the antithesis of feminism.
I wish I’d had Jennifer Scanlon’s Bad Girls Go Everywhere to recommend to this student. This very readable biography made me realize that Brown is a far more audacious thinker than I had thought, and that the intersection of women’s self-empowerment, sexuality, and class in mid-twentieth century America begs for closer examination.
Scanlon, a professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at Bowdoin College, weaves together three themes: Brown’s life experience; the nature of “Gurley Girl feminism”; and how understanding both helps fill the “chronological and ideological gap between the second and third waves of American feminism.” It is the third theme that makes the book worth scholarly attention.
Brown’s take on women’s roles clearly emerged from her experiences. Born in the Ozarks in 1922 to an Arkansas legislator and a mother angry that she was expected to give up her career, Helen Gurley, her mother, and sister Mary were left on their own after her father’s death in 1932. Her mother took in sewing and learned to type, but the Depression left few opportunities for women, and their poverty deepened after Mary contracted polio. They moved to California, where the plain but popular Helen learned a practical truth: Men had more money, and pleasing them brought riches. Yet the “predictable, if enervating, suburban lifestyle” expected of postwar women held little appeal. She moved from job to job, doing secretarial work for various businesses before becoming an advertising copywriter. She frankly enjoyed sex, didn’t feel demeaned by liaisons with the boss, and wasn’t afraid to say so. Thus emerged her advocacy of single women and their right to be openly sexual and remain unmarried—perhaps indefinitely. When she did marry David Brown, a magazine editor and movie producer, he championed efforts to get her ideas into print.
Much of Scanlon’s book examines Brown’s ideas about work and sex. Employment gave single women “something to be,” she wrote in Sex and the Single Girl. “While you’re waiting to marry, or if you never marry, a job can be your love, your happy pill, your means of finding out who you are and what you can do,” she said. Work was also a place to meet men, including married ones. Although Brown warned women that married men aren’t available when you need them, rarely get divorced, may not want you if they do, and often lie, she thought that sex was wonderful and that since many married people don’t have it with each other, extramarital relationships should not be taboo. It was this idea that put her book “over the top for many readers,” Scanlon observes.
Not surprisingly, few publishers would consider Brown’s work. Even the daring Bernard Geis, who published both Sex and the Single Girl and Sex and the Office (1964), insisted that she deemphasize advice on climbing out of secretarial roles. He banned her chapters on rape as sexual violence and on homosexuality as normal, along with references to abortion. “Strongly pro-choice and keenly aware of the double standard in place about men’s and women’s sexual behavior and sexual responsibilities, Brown never forgot the sting of injustice she felt in making those excisions,” says Scanlon.
One of Scanlon’s most intriguing chapters compares Brown to Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique (1963). Noting that the two women, born a year apart, had much in common in their efforts to “assist other women in their search for a more rewarding way of living a woman’s life,” she argues that Brown’s work, like Friedan’s, “introduced feminist thinking to millions of readers, documented both women’s aspirations and their discontents, and refused to apologize for . . . bold demands for women.” The difference was that Brown “sought to liberate not the married woman but the single woman, not the suburban but the urban dweller, not the college-educated victim but the working-class survivor,” says Scanlon. Notably, it was Letty Cottin—later Letty Cottin Pogebrin, an editor of Ms.—who was in charge of promoting Brown’s books.
Helen Gurley Brown took over Cosmopolitan, then a staid and failing eighty-year-old publication, in 1965 after the volume of positive mail in response to her books made her and David look for new media outlets to capitalize on her views. They had proposed a new magazine, Femme, but it was not picked up. At Cosmo, Brown’s first issue renewed the controversy over birth-control pills, then five years old, with its outrageous “sex-positive spin.” Circulation and advertising climbed. Paradoxically, Brown had to deal with the same demeaning issues as other executive women. “Hearst executives did not know quite how to handle a ‘lady editor,’” Scanlon writes, leaving her out of decisions affecting her magazine and social occasions designed to celebrate successes she had helped develop.
Scanlon does a superb job of helping present-day readers understand the breadth of Brown’s thought in the context of her personal history and early 1960s culture. That Brown’s views on issues most feminists support—workplace success, legalized abortion, rape as violence, and homosexuality as normal—were excised, sheds light on how much patriarchy and capitalism shaped and limited her books. One wonders if Brown’s views on women’s sexuality, presented as part of this larger constellation of ideas, might have made more feminist sense.
Yet the book is at times hagiographic. Scanlon cheerfully argues that, “Brown’s philosophy lives on in the twenty-first century, as new groups of women, calling themselves the third wave, enjoy sexy and revealing clothing, reclaim the term ‘girl,’ explore a variety of sexual practices, acknowledge the pleasures capitalism affords and the problems it inflicts, and attempt to make feminism more fun if not more youthful.” Well, maybe, but discussion of feminist “waves” tends to essentialize generations of women and collapse historical context. If Scanlon wants to draw parallels between Brown and young feminists, she needs to develop those ideas in more detail.
That said, Scanlon is onto something—as I have come to believe Brown was. Certainly, it is frustrating that Brown focused less on changing gender inequalities than on adapting to them. Yet Scanlon dares to question feminist hegemony. She says Brown “nearly exploded with frustration” when Gloria Steinem, in an interview, tried to make her into a victim. “Steinem and others defined Brown as naïve or antifeminist, yet her writings and her relationships with readers reveal a practice easily as complicated as theirs.” That point is worth more discussion.
In all, Scanlon’s book would be a good addition to a course on the history of feminist thought. It has much to offer anyone interested in reexamining 1960s feminism, as well as those interested in exploring what feminism means today.
JANE MARCELLUS
Middle Tennessee State University