Cosmo Editor and Counterculture Thinker Helen Gurley Brown Dies
After ‘Sex and The Single Girl,’ Fomented Newsstand Revolution
Helen Gurley Brown, who brought new thinking to the so-called women’s magazine by endowing Cosmopolitan with some of the counterculture thinking of the 1960s, died Monday, according to Hearst Corp., the magazine’s publisher. She was 90.
Ms. Brown spent more than three decades at the helm of “Cosmo,” a perch to which she ascended after publishing the 1962 book “Sex and the Single Girl.” Under her aegis, Cosmo developed into one of the leading chronicles of the sexual revolution. Ms. Brown often preached the virtues of pre-marital sex and pushed back against the notion that women needed to have a marriage to feel fulfilled. “Good girls go to heaven,” she was fond of saying, but “bad girls go everywhere.”
