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. [Read more...]