Posted on 09/04/2009 4:51:38 PM PDT by nickcarraway
SHE’S 87, STILL KICKING, and almost certainly still dieting, and the old bird has earned herself a scholarly biography the hard way; if Helen Gurley Brown’s journey from the outhouses and tent revivals of the Ozarks into the cocktail parties and four-color closings of the Hearst Corporation can’t make a corker of a story, nothing can. Bad Girls Go Everywhere, by Jennifer Scanlon, a gender and women’s-studies professor at Bowdoin, is a comprehensive report on HGB theory, which is in a revisionist phase. It rejects the earlier view, long held by giants of the women’s movement such as Gloria Steinem, who believed (per Scanlon) that Brown was a scourge who “enhanced men’s rather than women’s lives by turning women into sexually available playmates.” Instead, we are asked to consider Brown “a pioneer, a founder of the second wave.” Brown “has largely been left out of established histories of postwar feminism’s emergence and ascendance,” and this book purports to correct the record, telling the true story behind her “very particular and still-relevant brand of feminism.”
The central argument, in précis: second-wave feminism—with its endless reading lists and casually divorced breadwinners, its stridently unshaven armpits and Crock-Pots of greasy coq au vin—was fine for the educated set, the B.A.-in-anthropology, little-bit-of-money-put-aside women who could get themselves master’s degrees in library science, peel off the Playtex 18-Hour Living Girdle one last time, and divest themselves of the whole maddening, saddening, 24-Hour Living Death of mid-century housewifery. But the movement wasn’t much of a starter for the young women of the American steno pool—call them the Seven Thousand Sisters—who barely made it all the way through Doctor Zhivago, let alone The Second Sex, and who, moreover, had no desire to go through life looking like Sasquatch and feeling angry all the time.
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
Too many adjectival phrases.
Also, I had to look up “coq au vin” and was disappointed to discover that it isn’t necessarily something dirty.
Those who work to increase the entropy of society have the wind at their backs.
While they’re here, anyway.
You know, all other major points aside, if I make it to 87 I’m going to stop dieting!
Thanks for the post, Nick.
But it should be a crime if it’s greasy, oui?
You are welcome.
That picture is not big enough, I can barely see it.
She’s a big slut.
Nothing worse than an 87 year old slut.
Great article. Loved it.
parsy, who says thanks for finding this!
But made a lot more money than a lot more men.
you have to give her credit for coming out of appalachia and making it financially. She is the ultimate capitalist and is conservative...and for THAT I give her credit!
And THAT is why the Lefty feminnists never liked her or gave her any credit...after all, the Lefties look down on any “Hillbilly’ who made it in the capitalist world.
Angela Lansbury, however, looks elegant and lovely.
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