Week 5 - "Inventing the Cosmo Girl" Summary

This article discusses the origins and effects of Cosmopolitan, a magazine that became hugely popular in the 1960s and 1970s and has had a profound impact on our society. The concept of Cosmopolitan as we know it today began when Helen Gurley Brown wrote her novel Sex and the Single Girl in 1962, which quickly became a wild success. The book told the story of a common girl, who has very little going in her favor. It described how such a girl can flirt with eligible men, go on dates, and eventually marry the most suitable candidate. While the book was highly criticized by intellectuals, it still became extremely popular among the American girls. Brown took the ideas she presented in Sex and the Single Girl to the magazine Cosmopolitan and quickly became the new editor-in-chief. She radically changed the magazine’s content to target single girls with jobs. It described, in extremely simple and straightforward terms, how women without college educations can get jobs and continue to maintain their appearances. Brown’s goal with this magazine was to allow women to see the description of the “Cosmo Girl” and say “That’s me.”

Cosmopolitan advocated that girls should change their appearance and create an image for themselves in order to make themselves more marketable in the dating environment. It advised using all kinds of beautification devices, including wigs, fake nails, fake eyelashes, makeup, and even padded bras to complete this fake image. Some articles even addressed the worry of a significant other seeing the girl in the shower without this fake image, and presented strategies to prevent such a situation. Articles like these began to instill in women that beauty and image are everything and that women needed to be pretty to be successful and happy. In an already male-dominant society, this only helped to further subjugate and objectify women. Cosmopolitan gave women the idea that their worth was defined by how desirable they were.

The magazine also told women to use their attractiveness to get what they want and further their own goals. Brown encouraged young women to trade sexual favors for material gains and presents. She also almost seems to suggest using sexuality to secure jobs in the clerical and secretarial fields. She even said “Sex is a powerful weapon for a single women in getting what she wants from life” in an interview (Ouellete 266). Many women found Cosmopolitan’s messages more appealing than the traditional feminist movements since they felt more relatable and easy to follow. It does feel good to be “wanted,” but this message took that a step farther and made desirability the definition of a woman’s worth.