Helen Gurley Brown was an American author, publisher, and businesswoman. She was the editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan magazine for 32 years, as well as the author of Sex and the Single Girl.
Helen Gurley Brown was widely credited with being the first to introduce open discussions of sex into magazines for women. Early 1960s America was shocked by her articles and book and how outspoken she was about women's sexual freedom. Much of her work played a part in what is often called the sexual revolution.
Brown has had many large accomplishments throughout her lifetime. In 1960 she became one of the nation's highest-paid ad copywriters. Her book Sex and the Single Girl was published in 28 countries, and stayed on the bestseller lists for over a year. Brown had never held an editing job, until Cosmopolitan found out about her works and chose her to be their newest editor. When she took over, the magazine had a circulation of less than 800,000; in the 1980s, circulation approached three million. Her influence on Cosmopolitan was swift and certain and the look of women’s magazines today, "a sea of voluptuous models and titillating cover lines ", is due to her influence.
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Browns Legacy continues to live onto this day. rior to her death Brown established the Brown Institute for Media Innovation. Following her death, the trust continues donating much of its fortune to programs that serve the children of New York City. These donations have started initiatives to benefit at-risk youth, and increase representation of women and minority groups.
Among feminists, Brown's role has been highly contested as empowering women to be unashamed of their sexual urges and as creating a magazine that may live on as a sexist magazine with a body image problem
Sources:
“Helen Gurley Brown.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 20 Sept. 2017, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Gurley_Brown.
Fox, Margalit. “Helen Gurley Brown, Cosmopolitan Editor, Dies at 90.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 13 Aug. 2012, www.nytimes.com/2012/08/14/business/media/helen-gurley-brown-who-gave-cosmopolitan-its-purr-is-dead-at-90.html?mcubz=3.
The controversy surrounding Brown and people like her is something that's always interested me. So often it seems that pioneers and activists in any area are pushed to a kind of creative extremism that may ultimately grow out of control or in unexpected or negative directions - a strong voice in the sexual revolution is now a dissonant hurdle in the fight for positive depictions of sexuality and body image. As a copywriter, she'd know all about how to make ideas infectious and pervasive. What would she think of her own legacy?
ReplyDeleteI'm also intrigued by that magazine image and the idea of a Bedside Astrologer.
The treatment of Brown's work after her death is what makes me wary of my creative work being taken outside of my control. Her work was revolutionary for the time and the evidence is on every endcap of every grocery's checkout line today. Countless magazines use her format and style of journalism. Yet she is criticized for the choices that others who came after her have made.
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