Warrior Woman- Helen Gurley Brown

 

             Helen Gurley Brown was born on February 18, 1922 in Green Forest Arkansas. The Gurley family moved to Los Angeles after Ira M. Gurley, Helen's father, died in a tragic elevator accident. Helen's mother Cleo Gurley was left to raise her and her sister, who was partially paralyzed from polio, by herself. High school did not faze Helen as she set out to be do her very best. She found a passion for writing school publications and ended up finishing at the top of her class. From 1939-1941 she attended the Texas State College for Women before returning to Los Angeles where she attended Woodbury Business College.

          She was a secretary for the Music Corporation of America, a Beverly Hills talent agency, from 1942 to 1945. The secretaries were told to use the back staircase because the main staircase was for clients and male executives only. In 1948 she was the first woman to hold a copywriter position at Foote, Cone, & Belding. In 1959 she married David Brown who was the Vice President of production at 20th Century Fox movie studio. Helen disclosed that they had such a successful marriage because he never disturbed when she was working in her office on Saturdays and Sundays.
   
          Let's talk about sex. Women were expected to wait until marriage, usually, to have sex and it was deemed a taboo thing to talk about. Helen disrupted that chain of thought were her book Sex and the Single Girl which became a national best seller. The book opened the eyes of single women to the world of sex. Following this she became the editor in chief at Cosmopolitan. The magazine company was failing until Helen started writing articles about women in the workforce, meeting guys, and various sexual and intimacy articles. This caused much controversy especially after she published a nude centerfold of Burt Reynolds. Of course if it was a woman instead of a man there wouldn't be an issue. By 1990, Cosmopolitan had an extreme increase of sales and became the sixth best selling magazine.

         Helen Gurley Brown changed the way women and sex were seen. She wrote articles about ways to make a woman's sex life better and made it a point to focus more on sex than love. She wanted women to feel empowered when sex and/or intimate situations arised. Sex was no longer taboo or something to be whispered about. She changed the lives of so many women and yet we never talk about her. Helen died on August 13, in 2012 at 90 years old.