Helen Gurley Brown, 1922–2012

Just before the 1962 publication of her first book, Sex and the Single Girl, Helen Gurley Brown got a telegram from her mother, a former Arkansas schoolteacher, urging her to pull it. Instead, Brown turned her book’s scandalous message—that single women should have an exciting sex life—into a 32-year career as the editor of Cosmopolitan, where she helped recast modern womanhood. Her watchword was embroidered on a pillow she kept in her pink-walled editorial office: “Good girls go to heaven, bad girls go everywhere.”

Born in rural Arkansas, Brown led a life that “reads like a movie script,” said The Washington Post. Her father, a state legislator, died in an elevator accident when she was 10, and her mother moved the destitute family to Los Angeles. Brown studied briefly at Texas State College for Women, but when the money ran out, she returned to Los Angeles to finish business college and work in a series of secretarial jobs. After being given a shot at writing ad copy, said the Associated Press, she soon became “the highest-paid woman in advertising on the West Coast.”

Her “phenomenally popular” first book put Brown firmly in the public eye, where she remained for a generation, said USA Today. When she was named editor of the then dowdy Cosmopolitan in 1965, she put a busty model on her inaugural cover with the line “World’s Greatest Lover—What it was like to be wooed by him!” Brown’s editorship spawned the ideal of the Cosmo Girl, said The New York Times, a “self-made, sexual, and supremely ambitious” young woman who “looked great, wore fabulous clothes, and had an unabashedly good time when those clothes came off.”

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Cosmo’s cultural influence led to “everything from Miracle bras to the explosion in popularity of plastic surgery to HBO’s Sex and the City,” said the Los Angeles Times. Feminist Betty Friedan called the magazine an “immature, teenage-level sexual fantasy,” but Brown insisted she had empowered women. “I believe most 20-year-old women think they’re not pretty enough, smart enough, they don’t have enough sex appeal,” she once said. “All that raw material is there to be turned into something wonderful. I just think of my life. If I can do it, anybody can.”