Bad Girls Go Everywhere

Bad Girls Go Everywhere: The Life of Helen Gurley Brown
The Woman behind Cosmopolitan Magazine
By Jennifer Scanlon
Available August 31, 2010

First of all, I love my job especially when the email arrived in my inbox for my consideration in reading the biography of Helen Gurley Brown. I paused at my keyboard. Flashes of going Saturdays to the 7-11, armed with my babysitting and allowance money, to browse for goods before seeing a movie with my friends. I would stop at the magazine aisle. Above Tiger Beat sat the latest issue of Cosmopolitan magazine. As a 15-year-old girl, I chose it over any other magazine. After the movie, my girlfriends and I would pour over it page by page. I just loved the risqué topics. I never realized the force behind the production until the day the biography arrived at my door.

Before Carrie Bradshaw, there was the author of the international bestseller Sex and the Single Girl, Helen Gurley Brown. Back in the day, being an unmarried 22-year-old, she was considered an old maid. Helen finally met her soulmate when she was 37 – David, a former editor of Cosmopolitan and a studio executive at Twentieth Century Fox.

Although she is a woman of contradictions, Helen was a trailblazer helping single girls (never-married, divorced or widowed) to empower themselves. Men and children are wonderful; however you must not live through those people. She allowed women to feel sexually liberated while claiming an economic independence. In fact, the first thing that impressed her soon-to-be husband was that Helen bought a Mercedes Benz sports car in cash.

As I flipped through the pages of this amazing women’s journey (armed with a highlighter because I didn't want to forget anything), I realized that her ways of thinking resound today. What matters is that you do it on your terms, not because of what society dictates. Her complicated life story suggests how her issues with family, sexuality, feminity, ambition, success, and intimacy still hold true.

Before she was known as a “lipstick feminist,” Helen was a child of the Depression. Her mother, Cleo, married the man that met her family’s expectations, not because of love. Helen’s family moved to Little Rock, Arkansas where he was in the legislature. Little Rock is famous for where Anita Loos penned Gentleman Prefer Blondes (later to be made famous as the classic film starring Marilyn Monroe). The other famous link for Little Rock is when it was the first to implement the desegregation of its schools. The first group of black students, known as The Little Rock Nine, was escorted to school on the first day with the National Guard. Those events, along with her mother’s influence on her poor looks, set the backdrop of how Helen lived.

Since she felt she was a “mouseburger,” she relied on herself and her intelligence to survive. Being a hard worker from her first job she achieved professional success after many years of solid discipline, without the benefit of education or traditional beauty. She expected nothing less from her staff or her readers.
With no editorial experience, Helen stuck her foot in the door of Cosmopolitan and stayed for 32 years. She made the magazine her own, so much so that readers forgot that the magazine had been around for 80 years prior.

I can go on and on about the honesty and surprises that fill the pages, however this book is an important read for any person wanting to learn about that era. It might just make you grateful for the liberties we enjoy today.

This is the first biography of Helen Gurley Brown. While it is not authorized by Helen, she gave the author approval to quote from her published and unpublished writings that are in Sophia Smith Archives and nearly 50 boxes at Smith College located in Northampton, Massachusetts. The author is Jennifer Scanlon, a professor of gender and women’s studies at Bowdoin College. An award-winning teacher and scholar, she has published widely on consumer culture and women’s history.