November 01, 2016
Helen Gurley Brown
Source: Wikimedia Commons
She was right, too, about the like-it-or-not importance of beauty, as only a plain woman can be. Today, even the radically feminist xoJane unapologetically runs cosmetic reviews and how-tos, now domesticated under the SJW rubric of (cough) “self-care.”
Whereas, back in 1970, a hirsute and makeup-free gang, including Kate Millett and our old friend Shulamith Firestone, staged a sit-in at HGB’s (very pink) Manhattan office. They”d done the same at male-run women’s magazines, but Brown was the only editor who didn”t cave to their demands for bylines and so forth. Ordered to “rap about her hang ups” during this enforced Maoist “consciousness raising session,” the Pucci-clad, bewigged Brown”a California transplant, she was an enthusiastic veteran of wacky faddish therapies”merrily yammered on until the assembled women (who she kept calling “girls”) finally told her to shut the hell up.
Brown’s name-making blockbuster Sex and the Single Girl predated Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique by just under a year, so they were frequently linked during the rise and reign of women’s lib, inevitably if somewhat lazily presented as polar opposites. And inevitably, Friedan’s name pops up in these three biographies as an antagonist, as does the apt description of Helen Gurley Brown as a “lipstick feminist” (as opposed to Friedan & Co.’s supposedly “natural” variety).
All that shook loose a couple of associations:
In her 1963 feminist manifesto, Friedan employed an analogy she later claimed to regret: that “the women who…grow up wanting to be “just a housewife,” are in as much danger as the millions who walked to their own death in the concentration camps….”
Rereading that while writing this column, I remembered something else”an excerpt from the diary of British Lieut. Col. M.W. Cronin, RAMC, who was stationed at Bergen-Belsen:
It was shortly after the British Red Cross arrived, though it may have no connection, that a very large quantity of lipstick arrived. This was not at all what we men wanted, we were screaming for hundreds and thousands of other things and I don”t know who asked for lipstick. I wish so much that I could discover who did it, it was the action of genius, sheer unadulterated brilliance. I believe nothing did more for those internees than the lipstick. Women lay in bed with no sheets and no nightie but with scarlet red lips, you saw them wandering about with nothing but a blanket over their shoulders, but with scarlet red lips. I saw a woman dead on the post mortem table and clutched in her hand was a piece of lipstick. At last someone had done something to make them individuals again, they were someone, no longer merely the number tattooed on the arm. At last they could take an interest in their appearance. That lipstick started to give them back their humanity.
