Sex and the Single Girl by Helen Gurley Brown

The following excerpt is taken from the final chapter of the book. Never before had the sex life of single women been so openly discussed. Her book Sex and the Single Girl was published in 1962 and became an immediate best-seller. Her husband encouraged her to write a book about her experiences as a single woman. In 1959, when she was thirty-seven, Brown married film executive David Brown. By the late 1950s, Brown had become the top-paid female copywriter on the West Coast. She quickly displayed talent for the task and became an award-winning copywriter. 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 worked hard at her job and impressed her boss with the funny letters she wrote when traveling. (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.Īfter a succession of seventeen different secretarial jobs, Brown landed an executive secretary position at an advertising agency. But her oldest daughter, Mary, contracted polio there, and large medical bills strained the family's finances. 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.

Moved his young family to Little Rock when he was elected to a seat in the state legislature. Both parents had worked as schoolteachers, but Cleo quit teaching to raise her two children. Helen Gurley Brown was born on February 18, 1922, in Green Forest, Arkansas, the second daughter of Ira and Cleo (Sisco) Gurley. '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.' Brown described how to flirt, 'be sexy,' find available men, and have an affair. 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. In it she detailed how to get a satisfying job and earn pay raises, dress for success in business, eat right, and exercise. 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. 'I never met a completely happy single woman…or a completely happy married one!'Īt 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.

Sex and the Single Girl by Helen Gurley Brown