Inventing the Cosmo Girl: class identity and girl-style American dreams

Abstract

Since the mid-1970s, Helen Gurley Brown has been a cultural icon as well as the editor of the hugely profitable Cosmopolitan magazine. Following a cultural studies approach to media historiography, this article traces Brown's rise to fame and analyzes her early advice to women as a `cultural discourse' that managed some of the social and economic tensions of the early 1960s and early 1970s, while also offering certain women the symbolic material to think about themselves as historical subjects in new ways. Brown is often remembered as the feminine piper in the `sexual revolution' of the 1960s, but I suggest that her girl-style American Dream promised transcendence from class roles as much as sexual ones. Brown's early advice to women offers a case study in the cultural construction of class as a fragmented, socially constituted and sexualized identity.