![]() ![]() Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Canny enough to know that food brought in lucrative advertising, she merrily worked the food-sex angle, commissioning features like: "After Bed, What? (a light snack for an encore)."Ĭlose overlay Buy Featured Book Title Enter Helen Subtitle The Invention of Helen Gurley Brown and the Rise of the Modern Single Woman Author Brooke Hauser The Jell-O salads and roasts weren't tossed out – they were tarted up. ![]() In the three decades (1965 to 1997) that Gurley Brown wielded her audaciously outré blue pencil, Cosmopolitan went from minivan to Mustang.īut there was one piece of cargo from the minivan that Gurley Brown retained: food. Sex, sermonized Cosmopolitan, should be uncoupled from marriage, made guilt-free and available to all women. Under her bold auspices, the once stolidly suburban magazine gleefully smashed the prevailing taboos by pushing single women to play by the same sexual rules that applied to men. Helen Gurley Brown, the tiny, tough and influential editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan, who transformed the staid family magazine and took circulation to giddy heights, did so by lubricating its pages with one word: sex. She cannily combined them with features like "After Bed, What? (a light snack for an encore)." The legendary editor, subject of two new biographies, knew sex sells – and food brings in ad money. Helen Gurley Brown in her office at Cosmopolitan magazine in the 1960s. ![]()
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