A Thoughtful Moment

Book review of biography making the case for Helen Gurley Brown as the working-class mother of the second wave of feminism.  (Sex and the Single Girl came out before The Feminine Mystique.) 

In her entertaining new biography of Ms. Brown, “Bad Girls Go Everywhere,” Jennifer Scanlon, a professor of gender and women’s studies at Bowdoin College, charts her subject’s rocketlike rise out of the Ozarks. She also argues, convincingly, for Ms. Brown as a feisty, pivotal and too easily dismissed pioneer of the American women’s movement, one who dismayed more serious feminists with her breezy tone, her refusal to see men as the enemy and her belief that sex is not only great fun but also a “powerful weapon” for single women.