Cosmo Girl Essay

709 Words3 Pages
Inventing the Cosmo Girl The article was written by Laurie Ouellete. This article shows us how Helen Gurley Brown with the publication of “Sex and the Single Girl” helped change the goals and expectations of the working single girl. She was able to take a magazine that was first published in 1886 as a women’s fashion magazine with articles about home, family and cooking and turn it into a magazine about how single working women can use their sexuality to get what they want. She became Editor in Chief of Cosmopolitan in 1965 when the magazine was dying and immediately turned sales around. In a world where men were still predominate in the workforce, she let women know that it was ok to have a “Pink Collar” job and to use it to benefit you in whatever way that you wanted. Helen’s credo was that “We could look sexy, have a career and stay single for as long as we wished and still have an active sex life…like a man. Brown was concerned with improving the lives of woman that were stuck lower on the economic ladder. This could be done through performance, covert strategies, and cultural consumption. The new and improved Cosmopolitan magazine had headlines such as, “So you’re Bored to Death with the Same Old You.” And “Yes, you can change your image.” These headlines are used to influence women to not settle for what they think that they deserve but to go after what they want. Brown and Cosmopolitan helped move society into being more accepting of a woman being comfortable with her sexuality and that she didn’t have to be married to do it. At the time, women were expected to be conservative. Their goal was to find a husband and take care of the housework and stay at home with the children. Brown’s book Sex and the Single Girl took that idea and completely turned it upside down. She talked about women that were stuck in a social economic status and using it
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