Helen Gurley Brown

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Helen Gurley Brown

Excerpt from Sex and the Single Girl
Published in 1962.

"I never met a completely happy single woman…or a completely happy married one!"

At a time when American society made it very clear that women should aspire to be wives and mothers, Helen Gurley Brown lived happily as a single, working woman. Recognizing that some women felt torn between society's expectations of them to marry and a drive to pursue careers, Brown wrote Sex and the Single Girl as a guide for others to enjoy the kind of life she had discovered for herself. In it she detailed how to get a satisfying job and earn pay raises, dress for success in business, eat right, and exercise. While no book had ever before offered women such useful career advice, the book became a sensation for its explicit discussion of sex between unmarried people. Brown described how to flirt, "be sexy," find available men, and have an affair. "The single woman," Brown wrote, was "far from being a creature to be pitied and patronized," but instead was "emerging as the newest glamour girl of our times."

Helen Gurley Brown was born on February 18, 1922, in Green Forest, Arkansas, the second daughter of Ira and Cleo (Sisco) Gurley. Both parents had worked as schoolteachers, but Cleo quit teaching to raise her two children. Ira Gurley moved his young family to Little Rock when he was elected to a seat in the state legislature. When Helen was ten years old, tragedy struck when her father was killed in an elevator accident, leaving her mother to support her daughters during the Great Depression (1929–41), a period of high unemployment. Cleo moved to Los Angeles. But her oldest daughter, Mary, contracted polio there, and large medical bills strained the family's finances. (Polio is a disease that causes paralysis.) Helen did well in high school and worked to put herself through college while helping to support her mother and sister.

After a succession of seventeen different secretarial jobs, Brown landed an executive secretary position at an advertising agency. She worked hard at her job and impressed her boss with the funny letters she wrote when traveling. But when she wrote an essay which won Glamour magazine's "Girls of Taste" contest, her boss offered her the opportunity to write advertising copy. She quickly displayed talent for the task and became an award-winning copywriter. By the late 1950s, Brown had become the top-paid female copywriter on the West Coast.

In 1959, when she was thirty-seven, Brown married film executive David Brown. Her husband encouraged her to write a book about her experiences as a single woman. Her book Sex and the Single Girl was published in 1962 and became an immediate best-seller. Never before had the sex life of single women been so openly discussed. The following excerpt is taken from the final chapter of the book. It sums up Brown's advice for women, encouraging them to accept that neither single life nor married life is always blissful. She invites single women to ignore society's pressure to marry and to embrace the opportunities of the single life without guilt.

Things to remember while reading the excerpt from Sex and the Single Girl:

At the time Sex and the Single Girl was published, it was acceptable for single men to have sex, but not single women. Brown's book was the first popular book to address the concept that single women have sexual desires just as men do. This was one of the key ideas of the sexual revolution of the 1960s, a movement that encouraged people to reconsider many traditional beliefs about sexuality.
The introduction in 1960 of the first oral contraceptive (birth control pill), commonly called the Pill, helped raise the debate about sexuality because it enabled women to separate sex from procreation.
By 1965, five million women were taking the Pill.

Excerpt from Sex and the Single Girl

Chapter 13: The Rich, Full Life

I never met a completely happy single woman…or a completely happy married one!

A single woman admittedly has a special set of problems, but I think her worst one is not the lack of someone to belong to officially but the pippy-poo, day-to-day annoyances that plague her. For example, she has purchased a secondhand TV set from a private owner, and the 400-pound bargain is waiting in the trunk of her car to be brought upstairs and hooked up. She hasn't a date until next weekend—and anyway she outweighs him by ten pounds!

Or she has called a taxi to take her to the airport for a 6 A.M. departure. The taxi is now thirty minutes late, and she must be on that plane to keep an important business appointment in another city. A married woman could simply wake up a husband. That's what I did once in such a predicament. I woke up a husband next door ( and his wife, unfortunately, or I might have had more luck) and asked if he would mind driving me to a central part of town where I could find a cab. He was anything but thrilled with the idea, considering his wife's admonitions which I could hear from the bedroom,and I can't say I really blamed her. Mercifully, my taxi arrived while he was probably wondering how to say no.

These are the frustrating little experiences thatvex and humiliate a single woman from time to time; however, they are not so frequent as to make life unendurable. I've jotted down a few suggestions for coping with them.

And for a finale I can't resist adding a few last thoughts on how I think a single woman can have a happier life.

Be Brazen When Helpless

If there's anything you can't lift, lug, tote, tug or tow alone, you'll just have to get help; and it will mean imposing on your friends as well as total strangers. You'll have to speak up, too. Nobody's going to know you need a before-work ride to the doctor for abasal metabolism if you don't say so.

You'll find ways to repay. You'll help move them to their new apartment when the time comes, or bake a cake or send a valentine. You can even offer money tactfully, though you'll probably be refused.

Even wives have to be brazen sometimes. I know one married to a mechanical incompetent; for weeks she has been hunting for somebody able to get the hard-top off her convertible.…

Don't Compare Yourself to Married Couples

Your apartment, though charming, is not meant to compete with leading architects' houses photographed in Better Homes and Gardens. Your entertaining, often hostless, can't be like a couple's. Your guests, though highly amusing, could be considered a little off-beat in Married-landia. Your investment program can't begin to compare with a top executive's. But whose college education are you planning?

Married couples go places in neat little twos, fours, and sixes—which seems so orderly. Naturally they do! There are two of each, so they multiply for social outings in twos like themselves. But you are not one of Noah's aardvarks, and it is all right to move in threes and fives occasionally. HearingDixieland with a good friend and her beau is not the worst kind of evening when all you'd planned was to go to bed early. Having dinner with two delightful men can be sensational. Unmarried people's parties are often livelier because of the non-pairings.

The married usually go places on Saturday night, which seems so normal and American! Saturday is the logical night for parents to hire a baby sitter, do the whole bit and sleep late the next morning. What if your next big date is on a Tuesday? The food, the wine, the music and the chatter are just as sweet and the atmosphere is better for being less crowded.

Don't Fold Up over What You Read—or Don't Read

Many publications deal with the problems of single women in the same vein as their articles on fall-out. I read a newspaper editorial last night which stated among other philosophies: "The bachelor is only half-man or half-woman. They are to be pitied." Now really!

Still other publications—most others for that matter—ignore the existence of single women entirely!…

You see enough picture stories in national publications about couples and families to make you feel like the sole occupant of a life raft. To further depress you, the couples and families are always blueberry-pie normal, as industrious as gophers, and as much at home in the world as an egg in custard.

We know the married state is the normal one in our culture, and anybody who deviates from "normal" has a price to pay innonacceptance and nonglorification . There is no one universal "normal" time, however, for participating in the normal state of marriage. Furthermore, part of what you are at the moment, missing in marriage may be well worth missing!

Ernest Havemann, writing on love and marriage in the September 29, 1961, issue of Life, says:

Married love is not a constant round of candy, flowers and birthday presents. It is more likely to be a long series of sacrifices in which the fishing trip gives way to a down payment on a washer and the new party dress gives way to an appendectomy, and where even the weekly night out at the movies may have to give way to new shoes for the kids. It is not a guarantee of living happily ever after, for every marriage involves struggle, boredom, illness, financial problems and worry over the children.…
The love nest in the suburbs has a leaky roof, crabgrass, a mortgage that burns up every second paycheck and mice which the bride has to catch and dispose of single-handed because the husband has an annoying way of being on a business trip during every crisis.
The groom, alas, is not quite so brilliant as promised. His job prospects fade. He never earns that million dollars. He loseshis hair and his teeth. His wife loses her figure. The babies are not the dimpled darlings of the ads, butimperious tyrants who have to be bottled, burped, bathed and changed.…"
Are you really a great deal worse off than a wife?

[…]

Put Your Guilt Away

Would it surprise you to know that your most wicked and base thoughts—secret fantasies—even leanings to homosexuality, are not unusual, and should not alarm you? You may share your desire to make love to an African lion with the vicar's wife—or even the vicar! Far from making you a depraved monster, your thinking is probably not even original. This is theconsensus of psychiatrists. Doing something about these thoughts and not merely thinking them is what makes you cuckoo!

Perhaps you will reconsider the idea that sex without marriage is dirty. This is not a plea to get you into bed—your moral code is your business—but if you are already involved you might remember that sex was here a long time before marriage. You inherited yourproclivity for it. It isn't some random piece of mischief you dreamed up because you're a bad, wicked girl.

The psychiatrist I mentioned before frequently shows sexually guilt-ridden patients pictures from anentomology book. All the patients can figure out at first look is that they are seeing some kind of bug. "And do you know what the bugs are doing?" the doctor asks. No, they don't know. Well, the bugs, according to the text, are Mediterranean fruit flies engaged in the act of mating. "Okay, so what?" asks the patient. And the doctor explains that, by the patient's own concept of sex, he is looking at some very dirty pictures, indeed!

The point is, you may be much harder on yourself than you are on other creatures of nature who are less deserving of your tolerance. When you accept yourself, with all your foibles, you will be able to accept other people too. And you and they will be happier to be near you. (Big order, but you can fill it.)

Use the Time

The single years are very precious years because that's when you have the time and personal freedom for adventure.

Of course, maddeningly, the least appealing time to do anything is when you already aren't doing something.

If you can forget thestultifying concept that there are appropriate years for certain endeavors (like getting married) and appropriate days for being gay and merry (like Saturday nights) and use these times without embarrassment or self-pity to do something creative and constructive (what an assignment!), I believe half your single-girl battle is over.…

But if you are worried about being single, or, more importantly, uneasy about being you all your life (as I was and still am),intermittent forays into dressing, cooking, looking, flirting, and flattering better can help you rout the trembles.

One last thought: When you do start new projects, don't tell anyone. Once you've talked and bragged about your I'm-doing-me-over plans, you won't do them!

Finally

You may marry or you may not. In today's world that is no longer the big question for women. Those whoglom on to men so that they can collapse with relief, spend the rest of their days shining up their status symbol and figure they never have to reach, stretch, learn, grow, face dragons or make a living again are the ones to be pitied. They, in my opinion, are the unfulfilled ones.

You, my friend, if you work at it, can be envied the rich, full life possible for the single woman today. It's a good show…enjoy it from wherever you are.…

The End

What happened next…

Helen Gurley Brown maintained her media presence with a syndicated newspaper advice column, albums, and radio shows, but her second book, Sex and the Office (1964), failed to interest audiences as much as her first. In 1965 the Hearst magazine corporation offered Brown the chance to recreate Cosmopolitan magazine as editor in chief.

Brown immediately made the formerly conservative magazine the female equivalent to the men's magazine, Playboy. Brown quickly won a large audience for the magazine by introducing sexier cover models and controversial topics. By the time Brown "retired" as editor in chief of Cosmopolitan in 1996, she had transformed it into one of Hearst's most successful magazines.

Brown's celebration of an independent life for women was published a year before Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, which offered married women suggestions to make their married life more fulfilling. The two books' differing views of women's lives sparked lively debates about women's place in society. Indeed, the books also initiated discussion about the definition of feminism. Despite much controversy, both Brown and Friedan considered themselves feminists.

Did you know…

Warner Brothers purchased the rights to Sex and the Single Girl for what was then the highest price ever paid for a nonfiction title. They made a film of the same name in 1964 starring Natalie Wood (as Helen Gurley Brown) and Tony Curtis.
Sex and the Single Girl sparked debates about whether women put themselves in lesser positions to men when they dress or act in ways that appeal to men.
Brown's book shocked many people for its open discussion of sexuality.

Consider the following…

If Sex and the Single Girl were published today, how would public reaction to it differ from that of the 1960s?
How do you think a single mother's opinion of single life would have differed from Helen Gurley Brown's in the 1960s?
In what ways does Brown's advice to single women still apply today?