My Radical: Helen Gurley Brown
November 1, 2011
Critical Encounters is an initiative of Columbia College Chicago to stimulate conversation on socially and culturally relevant issues. This year’s theme, “Rights, Radicals and Revolutions,” looks at how the art world can create change. Here is my essay on a person who influenced me: Helen Gurley Brown. It was published in “The Columbia Chronicle.”
Glass sculpture by another favorite radical, Dale Chihuly
I grew up in a place where dreams ran small: rain for the corn crops, a win for the high school basketball team on Friday night, a blue ribbon for the dress I entered in the 4-H fair. Few women worked outside the home. If anything, they were teachers or nurses or secretaries. My father resisted, but my mother got hired as a typist, so I could go to college. That’s where I discovered both “Cosmopolitan” magazine and the women’s movement. These entities aren’t as opposing as they might seem.
My radical, Helen Gurley Brown, was the long-time editor-in-chief of “Cosmo,” as the publication is affectionately known to readers. But she didn’t start out that way. She spent many years as a secretary and a copywriter before authoring the then-sensational and best-selling “Sex and the Single Girl” in 1962. Three years later she took the helm of “Cosmopolitan,” and she steered it for 32 years.
Helen Gurley Brown, who married when she was 37, celebrated women and the single lifestyle. She urged us to pursue big careers, to be financially independent, and to enjoy sex and lots of it–but only when we chose to and when fully protected. She championed birth control when it was inadequate and abortion before it was legal. She promoted inner strength and outer beauty. Unlike her bra-burning contemporaries and often scorned by them, she delivered her message of freedom and choice while dressed in Diane von Furstenberg wrap dresses and high-heeled pumps. And no one from my generation will forget the infamous nude centerfold of actor and heart-throb Burt Reynolds, with one hand delicately draped in front of his delicates.
The magazine for many years was my personal instruction manual in both life and eyeliner application. When I launched my career as an independent journalist, I took its encouragement to heart. Yes, you can do this, it said, issue after issue. I came to believe.
In more ways than one, my life has paralleled that of my radical. I, too, was a secretary and a copywriter. I went on to write magazine and newspaper features, and have been published in dozens of national and regional consumer, trade, association and special interest publications. I marched for abortion rights in Washington, D.C., with the National Organization for Women. I compiled a stock portfolio and bought a sports car. Then I got married.
I wear stilettos.
