Gurley Girl Feminism: Helen Gurley Brown and the Invention of the Sexy Single Feminist

Helen Gurley Brown, celebrated author of the 1962 international bestseller, Sex and the Single Girl, diva of the New York magazine world, and 32-year editor of Cosmopolitan magazine, offered her Cosmo readers a few pieces of advice in her farewell column in 1997: every woman has something that makes her unique and gifted; men are not the enemy; and sex is among the best things in life. With these brief directives Brown summarized the philosophy that made her such an important and contested figure throughout the second half of the twentieth century. To conservatives, Brown’s books and magazine released the single woman from all social constraints, making her an autonomous, sexually liberated threat to the institution of marriage. To many feminists in the nascent and then evolving women’s liberation movement, Brown’s views enhanced men’s rather than women’s lives by turning women into playmates liberated only from the autonomy more radical feminism professed and promised. For her legion of fans, however, Helen Gurley Brown represented another path, one in which female autonomy and sexuality, heterosexual relationships, and the conscious performance and celebration of beauty coexisted amicably, if not always altogether peacefully, with feminism.

Four decades after Sex and the Single Girl, Sex and the City, an overnight television sensation, introduced a set of third wave “lipstick feminist” characters and social mores, and few among its fans or critics made the link between the contemporary feminism of Carrie Bradshaw and the earlier feminism of Helen Gurley Brown. To many in the third wave, second wave feminism had disallowed such “girlie” manifestations of feminism. This paper’s examination of Sex and the Single Girl provides both a necessary corrective to understandings of the second wave as sexually reactionary and a trajectory from which to better understand the motivations and philosophies of the third wave.