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But the movement wasn’t much of a starter for the young women of the American steno pool-call them the Seven Thousand Sisters-who barely made it all the way through Doctor Zhivago, let alone The Second Sex, and who, moreover, had no desire to go through life looking like Sasquatch and feeling angry all the time.įor these women, according to Scanlon, it took Helen Gurley Brown and her mass-market publication, Cosmopolitan (a month-by-month expansion of the ideas espoused in her 1962 blockbuster, Sex and the Single Girl), to advance some of the most important tenets of the new feminism: that a woman was entitled to a sexual life of whatever dimensions she chose that work could be as fulfilling for women as for men that the postwar American suburb and the role it offered to wives and mothers were spirit-deadening and that a woman did not need to marry to lead a happy life.īut it is only through a willful misunderstanding of Brown’s life story, and of the premise of the book that made her famous, that anyone could promote the notion that Brown’s work has been dedicated to any cause other than how to win a husband. The central argument, in précis: second-wave feminism-with its endless reading lists and casually divorced breadwinners, its stridently unshaven armpits and Crock-Pots of greasy coq au vin-was fine for the educated set, the B.A.-in-anthropology, little-bit-of-money-put-aside women who could get themselves master’s degrees in library science, peel off the Playtex 18-Hour Living Girdle one last time, and divest themselves of the whole maddening, saddening, 24-Hour Living Death of mid-century housewifery. It rejects the earlier view, long held by giants of the women’s movement such as Gloria Steinem, who believed (per Scanlon) that Brown was a scourge who “enhanced men’s rather than women’s lives by turning women into sexually available playmates.” Instead, we are asked to consider Brown “a pioneer, a founder of the second wave.” Brown “has largely been left out of established histories of postwar feminism’s emergence and ascendance,” and this book purports to correct the record, telling the true story behind her “very particular and still-relevant brand of feminism.” Bad Girls Go Everywhere, by Jennifer Scanlon, a gender and women’s-studies professor at Bowdoin, is a comprehensive report on HGB theory, which is in a revisionist phase.
S he’s 87, still kicking, and almost certainly still dieting, and the old bird has earned herself a scholarly biography the hard way if Helen Gurley Brown’s journey from the outhouses and tent revivals of the Ozarks into the cocktail parties and four-color closings of the Hearst Corporation can’t make a corker of a story, nothing can.
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