Helen Gurley Brown is the self-proclaimed “mouseburger” who hauled herself from Little Rock, Arkansas to bestselling author to editor of Cosmopolitan; now in her 80s she is a multi-millionaire, and the (still) immaculately coiffed and rail-thin editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan International.
It is a fascinating rags-to-riches story that academic Jennifer Scanlon reveals in Bad Girls Go Everywhere (OUP, 18th June) the first biography of Gurley Brown and a sprightly 225 pages.
After her father died and her older sister Mary contracted polio, Helen Gurley set out to support her family with a series of secretarial jobs, never hesitating to enjoy a rich social and sexual life along the way. Although she eventually married at 37, a shockingly late age for the 1950s (when girls were usually married by 20, and jobs, let alone careers, were considered to “spoil” them for catching a husband), she plundered her experiences, with the help of her husband, for the bestseller Sex and the Single Girl, which attacked the general consensus that single women were “sick”, “neurotic” and “immoral”.
It was a massive smash-hit, and eventually led to Gurley reviving the ailing Cosmopolitan magazine as the bible for single, sexy working girls everywhere-and also rousing the ire of feminists from Betty Freidan to Gloria Steinem who disliked her love of the (patriarchal) capitalist state and propensity to come out with statements such as: “I acknowledge that men keep women back but since sex is terrific and it comes from men, you can’t rule men out of this world and say they’re all terrible and rotten because you’re going to need them for your own purposes.”
Gurley’s contradictions and complexities are explored with great understanding by Scanlon. Her championing of women extended mainly to young, working-class single “gals”; she had little sympathy for domesticated home-workers and (pre-marriage) had few qualms about sleeping with married men. She equated sexuality with a monetary contract, expecting dinners, dresses and diamonds from her dates. She never considered herself attractive enough, keeping to a regimen of exercise and calorie-control even in her old age, and wrote “If you’re not a sex object, you’re in trouble. You can’t get anybody to bed unless you are the object of sexual desire.”
Bad Girls is a well-researched and entertaining gallop through sexual politics of the last 60 years, via 50s housewives, “Mad Men”-era officeworkers and70s second-wave feminism. The contradictory GB and her magazine were at the centre of it all; she proclaimed it was a “feminist” publication yet refused to editorialise the “negative” aspects of sex such as rape and pornography. She could be radical and forthright in her views (she was pro unmarried sex, pro abortion, interested in championing gay rights and equal pay) and sometimes scuppered by her own insecurities: Scanlon writes of the game of “scuttling”, in which the “fellows” at the radio station where Gurley first worked as a teenager would chase the female secretaries, receptionists and file clerks around the office and attempt to pull their panties off. It is telling that Gurley’s reaction was to feel humiliated that she was not considered pretty enough for this game.
A sharp and perceptive review. HGB and this book does raise interesting issues about what exactly makes a feminist, particularly from that post-war era. Julia Child (a US Delia precursor who UK folk will soon see played by Meryl Streep in Julie and Julia) could arguably have been feminist icon, but she chose to celebrate cooking, equated by second wave feminists with drudgery.