Helen Gurley Brown, longtime Cosmopolitan editor, dies at 90

Helen Gurley Brown, who inspired women in the 1960s to go out and get what they wanted out of life, including good sex whether they were married or not, has died.

The longtime editor of Cosmopolitan magazine died on Monday at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia, aged 90, said Hearst Corporation.

In 1962, Brown, a copywriter for a Los Angeles ad agency, wrote a book about the single life that she had recently left behind at what was then seen as the over-the-hill age of 37.

Her Sex and the Single Girl, a frank and exuberant mix of advice, exhortation and naughty girl talk, was a publishing wonder that broke ground by suggesting that the single woman not only had a sex life but was "the newest glamour girl of our times". She added: "Nice girls do have affairs, and they do not necessarily die of them!"

Many serious feminists have viewed Brown as a lightweight whose gushy writing style covered over a dual message that women were at once independent and yet should do everything they could to get a man.

But others, such as Barbara Ehrenreich, Elizabeth Hess and Gloria Jacobs, writing in Re-Making Love: The Feminisation of Sex (1986), consider Brown the "first spokeswoman for the [feminist] revolution."