I was never a Cosmo Girl. In the 1970s, when Cosmopolitan magazine stood for raunchy things such as leopard print and orgasms and calculating the likely penis size of the office boy, there were many of us who primly carried neatly folded copies of New Society in our home-crocheted shoulder bags and openly questioned the value of a sexual revolution that had turned out to have Cosmopolitan as part of its reward.

Among such humourless political types, the name of Cosmo’s coiffed and stick-thin New York editor Helen Gurley Brown was not often linked to the idea of feminist pioneering — except as an example of an unacceptable quisling. In 1962, her titilla-ting book Sex and the Single Girl had been a huge bestseller. From 1965 onwards (indeed for the next 32 years, until she was 75), she was at the helm of a magazine whose message was that being a sex object was a jolly fine thing to aspire to.

Well, the moral of the tale is that if you just live long enough, the whole world may come round to your way of thinking. Gurley Brown is now 87, as unnaturally thin as ever, and earns $2m a year as supremo of Cosmopolitan’s international arm. And she has lived to see a rather good biography from a professor of gender studies that makes a persuasive case for this reviled Pussy Galore figure as — good heavens — a linchpin of 1970s feminism.

Who was she, then? What made her so darned ambitious? Well, born into rural poverty in Arkansas in 1922, and fatherless from the age of 10, Helen Gurley actually had a very tough hill to climb. Little Rock, her childhood home, was a byword for small-town provincialism; her mother pinned all her hopes on a second marriage (which did not increase family fortunes); sister Mary succumbed to polio. Meanwhile, Helen herself suffered from only average looks, and she was not made to feel okay about it.

Naturally, all these circumstances conspired to make this smart-as-a-whip young woman not only streak out of Arkansas as if her tiny little bottom were on fire, but — significantly — reject female victimhood for ever. Once in Los Angeles, she quickly entered the world of advertising — a world you might argue she never left, because it was there that she not only formed a lot of her ideas about sex in the workplace, but also learnt to sloganise. By the time she wrote Sex and the Single Girl (at age 40), she was already a past master at putting a positive spin on anything women needed to do to work the system. Sex is not a weapon used by men, it’s a tool used by women! If a girl dresses sexily, it’s not because she has to, but because she can! “Since sex is terrific and comes from men, you can’t rule men out…you need them for your own purposes!” Men earn more than women, so they must naturally expect to pay for everything and buy you expensive gifts!

Sex and the Single Girl was both inevitable and a complete surprise. When she wrote it she had in fact been married for three years to David Brown, a man of ­substance she had pursued and attained when she was 37 and ready to settle down with a man who was as a) rich and b) as smart as she was. It was Brown’s idea that she write the book, reasoning that there must be a market for it, and he was damn right.As this book makes clear, before Sex and the Single Girl, unmarried women were characterised in 1950s pamphlets and magazines as not only morally reprehensible but almost sociopathic.

Meanwhile, avid Mad Men viewers will ask whether workplace gender relations in those pre-feminist days were really so shocking. Well, Brown herself once cited (as an example of “friendly sexual harassment”) a game played at a radio station where she worked in the 1940s. Called “scuttling”, it involved men chasing attractive women round the office and then pulling their knickers off. So yes, I think you could say it was.

If Sex and the Single Girl caught a wave, however, it was given a bloody good push by the author and her husband, who emerge from this book as brilliant zeitgeist specialists (Brown went on to produce the movie Jaws). Before such a thing was heard of, they came up with a multimedia sales campaign: Gurley Brown did tours, columns and interviews; she even tried to contrive a book ban, to increase news interest. Together they dreamt up a spin-off TV show called The Single Girl Sandra — which sounds terrific, but was ahead of its time (this was eight years before The Mary Tyler Moore Show put the first career-girl heroine on television in 1970). Later on, they came up with an idea for a magazine for older readers — and that was ahead of its time, as well.

Is Gurley Brown a heroine, then? What ultimately appeals about her as she is depicted here is that she cunningly combines realism and optimism in a way that makes her impossible to argue with. On the one hand she says, “Face it, this is the way the world is” and on the other she says, “But it’s great!” In her editorship of Cosmo, she wilfully ignored awkward turn-off feminist issues such as rape and pornography, but on the other hand she was unafraid to campaign on abortion and equal pay. The most interesting thing, ultimately, is that, when feminists in the 1970s decried her, she didn’t retaliate, partly because being negative wasn’t her style, and partly because she was a bit mystified. Weren’t they all on the same side? “Most so-called feminists…don’t get it with Cosmo,” she has said, with an audible shrug and a snap of the alligator handbag. “They just don’t realise that Cosmo is a feminist magazine.”

Bad Girls Go Everywhere by Jennifer Scanlon
OUP £15.99 pp288

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