The book’s success brought fame to Friedan and a powerful platform for more advocacy, but it did not in itself carry any program for political action. Nevertheless, in the federal government and among civil rights organizations, there was a growing recognition that discrimination against women was a serious injustice. At the end of 1961, President John F. Kennedy created the Presidential Commission on the Status of Women to investigate the issue, which two years later issued a report laying bare just how widespread the problem was. Published in 1965 as a book, edited by the anthropologist Margaret Mead, it became a bestseller. In 1963, the Equal Pay Act outlawed sex discrimination in hiring, and the following year, as part of the maneuvering to pass the landmark Civil Rights Act, sex was added at the last minute to the list of categories, along with race, color, religion, or national origin, upon which basis it was now illegal to discriminate. The law was largely ignored, however, for most of the rest of the 1960s, during which time the press regularly joked about the Playboy Club being forced to hire men as “bunnies” on the basis of equal rights.68 But despite the slow pace of legal change, the question of women’s rights to work and to live as they pleased had returned in full force to the mainstream of American culture. The moment was ripe for the return of the defiant single girl.
Sex and the Single Girl
In Live Alone and Like It and in her column, Marjorie Hillis raised and then sidestepped the question of sex and the single girl. “If you are hoping that we are going to tell you to go as far as you like, so that the responsibility won’t be on your shoulders, you are in for a disappointment,” she wrote. “This is every woman’s own special problem, which nobody else can settle.”69 Her tone was forthright, and her message was clear—the reader wasn’t going to get any dispensation from the author as higher moral power. No matter whether it was buying a lamp or bedding a lover, you, the Live-Aloner, were the one who had to live with it. So why on earth would you surrender your decision to someone else?
By the early 1960s, however, in the wake of Kinsey, Freud, and the Pill, the emphasis had changed—what mattered was the sex itself, not the responsibility of choosing how far to go and with whom. In 1962 a book appeared that would irrevocably yoke together sex, youth, and singleness with a marketing campaign, controversy, and runaway sales figures that recalled the Live Alone frenzy a quarter-century before. Its title, Sex and the Single Girl, like the similarly alliterative Live Alone and Like It, was meant to catch your attention, and then stick in your head like an advertising jingle. We can overestimate the shock value of the word “sex,” given how popular books about sex had been throughout the supposedly straitlaced ’50s. It was the coupling, so to speak, of sex and the single girl that made the book notorious.
The book’s author, Helen Gurley Brown, was like Marjorie Hillis a late bloomer. Forty and married when she rocketed to fame, she believed that it was high time somebody admitted out loud that unmarried women were having sex, and that many of them were surviving, enjoying the experience, and even turning it to their professional advantage. Three years later she would become editor in chief of Cosmopolitan magazine, and transform it into the bible of sexually liberated young women. There was no looking back.
That Sex and the Single Girl and The Feminine Mystique appeared within a few months of each other, in that order, can create whiplash—they seem to be writing for entirely different audiences, cultures, and eras. Gurley Brown’s funny, brassy, chatty style is worlds away from Friedan’s polished, erudite prose. Yet a closer look reveals their connections, their immersion in the marriage culture of the period, and their tentative efforts to find a way out. Both writers suggest that women can find a route to happiness with their own individual rebellion against conformity, but neither advocates an overthrow of the system. Indeed, they derive authority from their skill at maneuvering within it. Friedan let her readers know that she was married only when it was directly relevant, but Gurley Brown announced it in the first line of the book, as a victory, explaining her late start as the years she needed to become “emotionally ready” for her Hollywood-producer husband. Keen to emphasize that her book wasn’t a land-your-man manual, however, she waved off marriage as “insurance for the worst years of your life,” adding that “During your best years you don’t need a husband.”70
Helen Gurley Brown’s attitude to single life was full of contradictions. She declared that “the single woman, far from being a creature to be pitied and patronized, is emerging as the newest glamour girl of our times” and that the dire statistics around marriage published in magazines “give me a royal pain.” However, there was a caveat to this declaration of independence—you might not need a husband but “You do need a man of course every step of the way.” What follows in the first few chapters of the book is an oppressive catalogue of all the men out there, how to find them and how to get them to notice you. Men’s preferences and desires set the stage, and the single girl must wait for her cue. Her attractiveness and worth exist in the eyes of a man, when “He pictures her alone in her apartment, smooth legs sheathed in pink silk Capri pants, lying tantalizingly among dozens of satin cushions, trying to read but not very successfully, for he is in that room—filling her thoughts, her dreams, her life.”71
In order to turn herself into this male fantasy figure of “single bliss,” Gurley Brown was beyond blunt: “You have to work like a son of a bitch.”72 The following chapters are, indeed, exhausting to read and contemplate, as the author instructs the single girl to mentally round up all the men in her life, from the “Eligibles” to the “Don Juans” to the “Homosexuals,” and extending to her boss, uncle, clergyman, dentist, and the husbands of her friends. The goal might be to try to become “The Girl” to one of them, but the real purpose of making the list was to counteract any feeling of despair from those terrifying statistics: “over four million more single women than men at the last count.”73 But this counted only marriageable men, Gurley Brown reassured her readers. There were more than enough relatives, tradesmen, and weirdos out there to make any girl feel she lived in a man’s world.
If even after making her extensive lists, the single girl still felt herself insufficiently surrounded by men, it was her job to go out and insert herself into their spaces and their lives. This might mean changing jobs, if at the current office, “you never even see somebody you could be happily ensconced in a bomb shelter with.”74 Activities like sports should be pursued in accordance with how much men enjoy them, though Gurley Brown does admit that there’s a “compensatory thrill” to whizzing down a ski slope. Lest women get carried away pursuing their own pleasure, however, they’re reminded that skiing, skating, or tennis will also keep them thin and give them an opportunity to wear a cute outfit.75 If the ice rink didn’t do it, there were political clubs, singles mixers, Alcoholics Anonymous, work trips, and vacations—all of which were hunting grounds where a woman could position herself as appealing prey: “Girls with something to do and places to go are better game than placid creatures who are kind of underfoot.”76 In familiar self-help style, Gurley Brown wove in the stories of her friends, under pseudonyms, to provide “case studies” where her own experience was lacking. She was careful to warn against going on the prowl at one likely haunt, however, no matter how many men were there—in bars, men were apt to judge a woman as lonely, or “an itsy witsy bit frantic.”77
Making oneself over into prey, or “man bait,” took work, but luckily men were easy to distract with shiny objects. A girl wearing unusual jewelry, reading a controversial book, lying on a “mad” beach towel, riding a Vespa, or driving a bright pink car could be guaranteed at least some attention. However, “You don’t have to be Auntie Mame and electrify everybody with your high-voltage personality,” Gurley Brown sniffed—it was tiresome to make yourself the center of every story. A single girl could stand out only so far, and only as a way of ultimately fitting in.
When Gurley Brown got around to discussing sex, she betrayed the influence of the scientific
experts of the 1950s, in their gender essentialism, faith in psychiatry, and Freudian theories about sexual development. A sexy woman was one who enjoyed sex, which meant that she accepted herself “as a woman . . . with all the functions of a woman.” The author explained that this meant “You like to make love, have babies, nurse them and mother them (or think you would).”78 She cites Alfred Kinsey and the early twentieth-century sexologist Havelock Ellis as authorities to back up her somewhat hazy theories about men who were attracted to certain body types because they reminded them—or didn’t—of their mothers. For a woman who wasn’t sexy, meaning she didn’t enjoy sex, there were two options—either to “be an actress” and fake it, or get “qualified help” to sort out her psychological barriers (calling up one of the most diehard Freudian clichés of the era, she claims that “Manhaters may secretly envy men’s penises”).79
The real shock of the book for its first readers lay in chapter 12, “The Affair: From Beginning to End.” Earlier on, Gurley Brown listed the pros and cons of an affair with a married man, concluding that it was better to “keep them as pets,” but this section went into far more detail about when, why, and how to have a sexual relationship.80 Like Betty Friedan, Gurley Brown took aim at the false messages being peddled by the majority of magazines—“other than Playboy”—that any woman who had an affair had to marry the man, leave town, or die. On the contrary, she says, “Nice, single girls do have affairs,” and might or might not suffer for them—but that depended on the man and the circumstances, not on the sex.81 She advised against pursuing an affair if it was only out of physical desire (“the urge to merge”), or in pursuit of security or approval, but purely moral considerations were out the window. Imagining a reader’s question as to whether the man should think she is a virgin, her response was simple: “I can’t imagine why, if you aren’t. Is he?”82 She even, briefly, acknowledged the existence of same-sex relationships, although she told lesbians she had no particular advice to share: “It’s your business and I think it’s a shame you have to be so surreptitious about your choice of a way of life.”83
Helen Gurley Brown’s frank discussion of unmarried sexuality, and the consequent notoriety of her book, woke other self-help authors up to this new market and new reality. Even Eustace Chesser, the 1940s author who had demystified sex for married couples, published a sequel—or perhaps prequel—Unmarried Love, in 1965, “somewhat to his dismay.” By the end of the decade, the single woman “accepted sexual freedom as her due,” marking the beginning of the era in which sex became a part of individual experience, rather than being understood and discussed strictly in the context of marriage.84
Was there a way for the single girl to be happy when she wasn’t in bed? In the second half of her book Gurley Brown channeled her inner Marjorie Hillis, offering advice about living alone, decorating, eating, and entertaining. “Roommates are for sorority girls,” she decreed early on. “You need an apartment alone even if it’s over a garage.”85 Many of her principles could be straight out of Live Alone and Like It, that a single woman’s apartment deserved just as much money and attention paid to it as a family home, that it shouldn’t cost too much money, and it made sense to avoid a lengthy commute—either to one’s job, or to the man one was dating. But here again, the central importance of men was underscored in a way that was quite alien to Marjorie. A woman ought to make her apartment sexy and welcoming to a date, with pictures and posters, a television, hi-fi, and plenty of books, not to mention good towels and “an ash tray with two fresh cigarettes and matches handy in the john.” It had to smell good and seem inviting—but the author drew the line at lingerie in plain view. “She wants her apartment to be sexy, not necessarily to encourage rape.”86
When it came to entertaining, a single woman eventually had to return the favor of the parties to which she’d been invited—here again, Gurley Brown complained that magazines were out of touch with the lives and needs of single women, perhaps anticipating her makeover of Cosmopolitan. Corned Beef and Caviar-style, she offered up a trio of dinner menus and recipes, but emphasized that these were strictly for guests, involving elaborate preparation and expensive ingredients. Alone, the single woman ought to be feeding herself far more frugally. Gurley Brown was a self-professed “health nut” and a “skinny,” and for all her emphasis on eating protein and a filling breakfast, it’s clearly the skinny part that matters more than the health—if only on the basis of her terrifying two-day crash diet that consists of an egg and a glass of white wine for breakfast, two eggs and two glasses for lunch, and for dinner, a steak and the rest of the bottle. Don’t plan on doing much else while you’re on this kamikaze diet, though: “Sufficient nutrition is here, but you get fuzzy.”87
After the success of Sex and the Single Girl, Gurley Brown capitalized on her notoriety with a sequel, Sex and the Office, published in 1965. Beginning with advice on how to manage the boss, the most important man in a working girl’s life, the book went on to cover how to dress for the office, how to make the most of the lunch hour and navigate office politics, and how to “start sneaking up on the boys career-wise,” which Gurley Brown advised would take more than brains and talent, requiring “a certain amount of listening, giggling, wriggling, smiling, winking, flirting and fainting” to get ahead.88 She went on to lecture the reader that she needed to actually work at her job, and not simply expect to turn up and be decorative. “Forget the fact that working hard at a job seems kind of antique . . . something girls did only during the Great War or the Great Depression.”89 A job, Gurley Brown had already decreed in Sex and the Single Girl, offered an unmarried woman an identity, “something to be,” where a married woman already was something: “somebody’s wife.” Furthermore, a career was “the greatest preparation for marriage,” as it trained a woman in how to please men.90
The workplace, in Helen Gurley Brown’s writing, was not a place for political action—although later in the 1960s it would be the site of fierce battles over women’s rights, wages, and bodily autonomy. If you discovered that someone else made more than you, her advice was to “be philosophical,” and accept that “every company has things completely screwed up in matching the rewards to the workers.” She even claimed that “no-one knows why.” The best thing for a woman to do, as Marjorie Hillis advised in Orchids on Your Budget, was to keep a tight rein on what she could control—her own budget. Having grown up poor in small-town Arkansas, Gurley Brown’s money advice came from a place of steely determination and self-discipline. She advised negotiating the rent, taking on extra jobs, brushing your teeth with baking soda, and never, ever paying for your own cocktails. Like Hillis, though, she insulated the book against the specter of real poverty by couching this economy in the language of pleasure: “Scrimp on what isn’t sexy or beautiful or really any fun, so you can afford what is.”91
A single woman in the 1960s trying to use Helen Gurley Brown to lead her to happiness was liable to feel just as much paralyzing confusion as the housewives in Betty Friedan’s book. Rife with contradictions about how to be happy and what a purposeful life could be, Sex and the Single Girl struggled to find a balance between an oppressive culture of “normality” and the safe limits of rebellion. In the final chapter, “The Rich, Full Life,” Gur-ley Brown revived some of the more general principles of Marjorie Hillis’s Live-Alone program, but without the conviction that made that earlier book so convincing. At the time of writing, forty-six-year-old Marjorie had not yet met the man she would marry, while forty-year-old Gurley Brown had married recently enough that her triumph and relief were still fresh. “We know the married state is the normal one in our culture,” Gurley Brown wrote to her single sisters, “and anybody who deviates from ‘normal’ has a price to pay in nonacceptance and nonglorification.”92 This depressing state of affairs was something a single woman simply had to accept. Gurley Brown painted a picture of a world doing battle with the women who—by choice or accident, to use Marjorie’s phrase—didn’t fit its mold: “You se
e enough picture stories in national publications about couples and families to make you feel like the sole occupant of a life raft,” she wrote. Couples were “blueberry-pie normal” and “as much at home in the world as an egg in custard,” while single women were ignored or pathologized.
So how could they fight back? Was there any real hope for happiness? Friendships with other women were in no way a source of comfort and support, in Gurley Brown’s ruthless world. “Don’t run with the mouse packs,” she advised—other single girls were competition, and en masse they would threaten and scare away men. But there was freedom in singleness—you could travel alone, live abroad, use your free time to expand your mind and your horizons. In particular, there was freedom in growing older. While Gurley Brown of course advised her readers to stay as healthy, youthful, slender, and beautiful as they could, for as long as they could, she nevertheless saw a glimmer of hope in the future, when “it helps to have other things going for you—a little money . . . a little travel, the ability to cook well and entertain.”93 Unlike the married women in their forties who, with their children grown up, found themselves suddenly at the end of what society deemed their useful lives, a single woman who had never done what society demanded suddenly might find herself happier, and more optimistic, than her blueberry-pie-normal sister.
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