How many times have you seen articles asking this question? 

Helen Gurley Brown the woman who coined the phrase, ‘women can have it all’ died last week in New York aged 90.

During her 31 year stint as Editor of Cosmopolitan magazine, HGB as she was called by her staff took the little known magazine to a staggeringly successful international title.  In 1972 when the magazine launched in this country there was nothing like it.  Sex and the single girl wasn’t only the title to one of Helen Gurley Brown’s books, it was also the subject mostly covered by the magazine.

The sexual liberation women experienced in the 60s combined with the introduction of the contraceptive pill meant that young women in the 70s were encouraged to have sex for fun. 

Coming from a very modest background and a family blighted with tragedy and illness, her father dying in a freak accident when she was ten, meant that Helen was forced to become the breadwinner at a young age.

After several secretarial jobs she became personal secretary to Don Belding, chairman of the advertising agency Foote Cone and Belding.  It was Don who launched her career by making her the first female copywriter in the agency.

This was the start of a lucrative career as she became one of the highest paid women in advertising on the West Coast.  Helen set her goals high in her career and personally, vowing to never get hitched to a “gas station attendant or somebody who boxed the groceries because he was sexy”, she set her sights on finer things.

Helen Gurley Brown’s message to young women in Sex and the single girl was get a job, enjoy sex and don’t rush into marriage, she wrote “I think marriage is insurance for the worst years of your life. During your best years you don’t need a husband.”

She followed her own advice and held out – enjoying sex as a single woman until she was 37 when she married David Brown the acclaimed film producer.  This wasn’t before carefully playing her hand, being hard to get while working, then being adoring and submissive when they were together.  A tactic that worked up until his death in 2010, they enjoyed over 51 years of married life together. 

Often looking on the brink of death Helen Gurley Brown maintained that it was not possible to be too thin: “Skinny is sacred; anybody plunking down a plate of fried zucchini would be trying to poison me.” She considered growing old to be “the most disgusting thing in the world” – something that was every woman’s duty to fight.  In later life she embraced cosmetic surgery having always considered herself an archetypal plain Jane, who through sheer determination and ambition got the glamorous job and lifestyle.

Helen Gurley Brown never had children; she never wanted them on the grounds that they would be “horrible little competitors.”

Can women really have it all? 

So many changes have come about since the launch of Cosmopolitan in this country.  Women are empowered as never before, they are marrying and having children later, they are now more likely to be financially independent and they are certainly having sex for fun!

Photo: AP Helen Gurley Brown in 1982