Helen Gurley Brown unquestionably changed the face of women's media. She transformed Cosmopolitan when she served as its editor-in-chief of from 1965 until 1997, wrote books that championed the lives of single women, and was fearlessly outspoken about the joys of sex. She was so outspoken, in fact, that she became eminently quotable, most often on the subjects of work, relationships (or why you don't need one), and female pleasure.
Back in February, on Gurley Brown's 90th birthday, HuffPost Women celebrated how Gurley Brown paved the way for women's magazines to openly discuss women's complex and varied sex lives. Judith Warner voiced similar sentiments in a piece she wrote about Brown for the New Yorker in 2009:
In everything that Brown has written or edited, she has promoted the message that sex is great, and that one should get as much of it as possible. (Ditto for money.) Just about everyone knows this, and has always known it, but in Brown’s youth few women would admit it, even to themselves. So if, in 1963, sex did cease to be quite so clandestine a pleasure -- especially for unmarried females -- that was, in part, her doing.
So thanks, Helen Gurley Brown, for taking our sex lives out of the shadows. Not every woman would consider herself a "Cosmo Girl," but every woman can appreciate Brown's candor and conviction that self-sufficiency was a woman's greatest asset. "What you have to do is work with the raw material you have, namely you, and never let up,” she once wrote. Amen.
LOOK: Helen Gurley Brown's Best Quotes
