newjerseynewsroom.com

BY ADELE SAMMARCO

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

She was the brains behind the single woman’s guide to sex and the city.

Helen Gurley Brown, a pioneer before her time and the first Carrie Bradshaw, penned “Sex and the Single Girl” in 1962 and for the last half century has been transforming women’s lives all over the globe.

Brown passed away Monday at the age of 90 in Manhattan.

In the turbulent 1960s, long before the Equal Rights Amendment was passed out of Congress in 1972, Brown’s book became a best seller. A movie version soon followed with Actress Natalie Wood portraying Helen Gurley Brown.

Born on Feb. 18, 1922, in Green Forest, Arkansas, Brown often said she did not find herself to be cosmopolitan, but rather “hillbilly”. Her father died when she was just 10 years old and her mother, a school teacher, moved the family to Los Angeles.

There, she became her high school’s valedictorian, and learned typing and shorthand in business college. Throughout the late 1940s and 1950s, Brown worked as a secretary at the William Morris Agency, the Daily News in Los Angeles, and, in 1948, the Foote, Cone & Belding advertising agency.

While at the latter agency, Brown was given a shot at copy writing, and won some awards. Soon after, she was hired by Kenyon & Eckhardt, which made her the highest-paid woman in advertising on the West Coast.

In 1959 at the age of 37, she married twice-divorced David Brown, a former Cosmopolitan managing editor-turned-movie producer, whose credits would include "The Sting" and "Jaws."

They couple would have no children, she said, “by choice.”

Soon after their wedding, Brown and her husband pitched a women's magazine idea at Hearst, but was turned down. Instead, Brown was hired to run Cosmopolitan.

Brown is quoted as saying her aim was to tell female readers, "how to get everything out of life such as money, recognition, success, men, prestige, authority, dignity – whatever she is looking at through the glass her nose is pressed against."

At its inception, Cosmopolitan was not very popular with feminists.

One early critic was feminist writer Betty Friedan, who dismissed the magazine as "immature teenage-level sexual fantasy.”