By Melanie Linn Gutowski

Plucked from the obscurity of an ad agency's secretarial pool, she is single-handedly credited with giving single career women a voice in American society. She's Helen Gurley Brown, and thanks to shows like Mad Men, her words of wisdom are enjoying a resurgence in popularity.

Transcending her underprivileged childhood to become valedictorian of her class and go on to make feminist history, Brown met her future husband while on the job as an advertising copywriter.

It was Brown's husband, film producer David Brown, who suggested the title and premise for his wife's 1962 bestselling book, Sex and the Single Girl. In it, Brown offered single career women advice on everything from sleeping with the boss, to getting a makeover, to recipes for entertaining.

Brown later went on to become the legendary editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan magazine from 1965 to 1996. It was Brown who coined the term "Cosmo girl," a phrase defining the magazine's audience. She dramatically changed the magazine's content to appeal to what Brown knew to be an underserved demographic: the single career girl. Prior to Brown's tenure, the magazine had been focused on housewives and was foundering.

"Nobody was championing [single women]," Brown told author Roy Newquist in 1967. "Volumes had been written about this creature, but they all treated the single girl like a scarlet-fever victim, a misfit, and...you can't really categorize one-third of the female population as misfits."

That's a sentiment all of us PANKs can relate to, married or not. Though she initially belonged to one under-championed demographic, she later became part of another: Brown and her late husband never had any children.

Melanie Linn Gutowski, Savvy Auntie's Associate Editor, is a proud Godmother and ABC.

Photo: Library of Congress
Published: July 20, 2010