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“It won’t work,” he told her after that first read. “It’s not yours. It’s tight—it’s not you.” She showed David several other starts, which he promptly rejected for the same reason. Her writing wastoo structured, her tone impersonal—it wouldn’t speak to people, it wouldn’t sell.
    David envisioned a cutesy manual for girls who wanted to get rid of the extra men in their lives so that they could home in on Mr. Right, but as Helen jotted down more and more notes about her days as a bachelorette, she realized that she was tapping into a much bigger theme:the stigma of the single woman. In July 1960, Look magazine had run a story titled “Women Without Men,” which reported that 70 percent of American girls married before the age of twenty-four. “From then on,” warned the writer, Eleanor Harris, “it’s a downhill slide.” In her piece, Harris portrayed singledom as a social illness worthy of psychiatric help. Single women generally felt that they weren’t “getting much out of life,” said one psychiatrist who was interviewed for the article. As a group, they were dissatisfied, anxious, and depressed. Those who weren’t on a “frenzied man hunt,” Harris added, possibly had a “sex problem” like Lesbianism (with a capital L ). Others were content to settle for “a man-free life.”
    But what about all the women who weren’t ready to get married and didn’t want a man-free life? Did they really have to abide by the prissy advice in old-fashioned magazines like Ladies’ Home Journal ? “There are two sound ways for a girl to deal with a young man who is insistent,” the Journal proclaimed in a May 1961 article about double standards. “She can marry him, or she can say ‘No.’” Of course, a girl could say “yes” before marriage and often did—and Helen, for one, believed she would be better off for it. A woman who had taken the time to date around and develop herself as a full person would be more interesting and prepared for marriage when she finally did find the One.
    Armed with new conviction, Helen sat down and wrote her opening lines—how she had managed to land a great man withoutbeing scintillating or all that pretty. She took it to David, and after reading it, he finally gave her the approval she craved. “I think you’ve got it,” he said. It was a go.
    Ideas came to her while she was in the shower, under the hair dryer, and at her desk at the agency. She developed her own outline, much more detailed than David’s, and by the time she finished adding to it, she had a sheaf of papers—it was almost a book. She wrote and rewrote the sample chapters until they sounded as if they had simply written themselves.
    David was her first reader and her connection to people who mattered. It was David’s trail of friends from the publishing world that eventually led to Bernard Geis, after a series of other publishers had turned the book down, dashing her confidence. As hands-on as Berney was, David was Helen’s live-in editor—and he was merciless. Sometimes he crossed out whole passages. He made her rewrite the big chapter, “The Affair,” three times over before he accepted it.
    It was David who told Helen to publish Sex and the Single Girl under her married name, even though he knew his own family would disapprove. For the book to be successful, he insisted, she needed to have authority, and in order to have authority, she had to be courageous enough to write about her own experiences and affairs.
    As Mrs. Helen Gurley Brown, she was living proof that a nice girl could have sex, like it, and use it to her advantage.

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    A F UN S CAM
    1962
    â€œAn extra woman is a problem. . . . Extra women mean extra expense, extra dinner-partners, extra bridge opponents, and, all too often, extra sympathy.”
    â€”Live