#3)Helen Gurley Brown(02/18/1922 – )writer
Quote: “Good girls go to heaven, bad girls go everywhere.”
#2)Andre Breton(02/18/1896 – 09/28/1966)
French surrealist writer
Quote: “Words make love with one another.”
#1)Yoko Ono(02/18/1933 – )artist
Quote: “Cosmetics is a boon to every woman, but a girl’s best friend is still a nearsighted man.”
Bonus Jewish Birthday: Sholom Aleichem(02/18/1859 – 05/13/1916)
Russian writer
Quote: “No matter how bad things get, you got to go on living, even if it kills you.”
Though Helen Gurley Brown didn’t invent sex, she sure made it more fun for women who read her best-selling books and enjoyed her work as Editor in Chief of Cosmopolitan magazine.
IMPACT ON THE ’60s: She is arguably one of the most influential women of the decade, perhaps even the century, and she did it all with her pen, first by writing the best-selling Sex and the Single Girl in ’62, and then by assuming the Editor in Chief position at struggling Cosmopolitan magazine in ’65. For the next 32 years she instructed, helped, advised, cheered for, encouraged, liberated, and promoted women, givining them a new manual for the sexual revolution. She was a powerful voice advocating women’s sexual freedom — armed with the pill, she showed women how they could use it, how they could take advantage of it, how they could thrive with the new technology, the new attitudes of the ’60s, and the new control they had over their sexual destinies.
After the ’60s, of course, she continued at the helm of Cosmopolitan, guiding it to spectacular sales since she took over. An under-achieving magazine with a circulation of 800,000 n ’65, Cosmo has become the most successful woman’s magazine ever and one of the five largest-selling periodicals on U.S. newsstands. One of the most famous issues appeared in ’72, it had Burt Reynolds as the first nude male pin-up. She’s also continued to write books, following up her four ’60s works with Sex and the New Single Girl in ’70, Having It All in ’82, The Late Show: A Semi Wild but Practical Guide for Women Over 50 in ’93, and The Writer’s Rules: The Power of Positive Prose — How to Create It and Get It Published in ’98.
HER ’60s LOOK: To her credit, in the ’60s she was alway tasteful and intelligently conservative with her facial look — despite the craziness going around her with little English bobs and wildly colored eye makeup, she stayed smart, urban, chic, stylish, and glamorous, so that she looked great and like someone who instantly commanded respect, whether she was in an editor’s meeting or an elegant restaurant. We’ve looked at dozens of photos of her, and she’s always impeccably and expensively dressed — not one for jeans or sweats, she’s always in style and elegant, on the tailored side of fashion. She could wear short dresses, fashionable suits, colorful prints, beautiful French dresses, and flashy jewels. What’s more, she kept her look going long after other women gave up, so that her long successful career has been matched by her long successful life as a woman of fashion; today she still looks cultured and careful, poised and professional.
Yoko:
Interview
