As I’ve enjoyed reading reviews for the 1962 Club this week, I’ve been intrigued by attempts some readers have made to treat their choices as bits of social history and draw lessons about what life was like in 1962. Respectfully friends, I don’t think most of the novels are telling you very much. No, there is clearly only one bombshell book that defines 1962 for the historian: Sex and the Single Girl by Helen Gurley Brown.
Famously subtitled “the unmarried woman’s guide to men”, Sex and the Single Girl sold millions of copies immediately on publication and was released around the world. If there were ever a sign of seismic societal changes, this guide to enjoying life outside of marriage was it and played a pivotal role in normalizing the attitudes that would shape the rest of the decade as the sexual revolution erupted.
Brown is very clear that this is not a guide to getting a husband. (Except when it clearly is.) But it is a guide on what kind of men to look for – and the answer is all of them. Brown’s axiom is “it really is important to surround yourself with men every day to keep up your morale” and that morale isn’t dependent on any sort of sexual frisson with the bulk of this necessary entourage. Family, colleagues, gay friends, tradesmen – all potential sources of male admiration have value. If you haven’t found them yet, she helpfully breaks down where to find them with blunt comments on the pros and cons of various habitats (bars, though initially promising, are in fact too bleak to bother with).
This is not a book about how joyful and easy it is to be a single woman with freedom and Brown is characteristically blunt about that: “There is a catch to achieving single bliss. You have to work like a son of a bitch.” And even when you work, and even if you find a man you want to sleep with (and Brown is far from pressuring you to do so, just wanting you to have options), she tries to keep expectations low. What incentive, after all, is there for a man to make sure the woman is having a good time since he never needs to see her again? The awfulness of casual sex is one of the most obvious consequences of sexual freedom and yet it still seems to surprise every new wave of young women when they learn it:
If a husband doesn’t get to a mutually enjoyable level with his wife, she may cut him off without any sex at all. He’d better help her like it. If a single woman isn’t having a good time in bed, her partner would just as soon not know about it!
There is a bonkers dynamic to these first chapters about men, with Brown strategizing about catching a man while throwing in casual comments that make it all seem like a waste of time. The advice is enlivened by anecdotes about clearly fictious friends and colleagues, which are comical rather than convincing – just one of the may ways this book harkens back to the original guide for single girls, Live Alone and Like It by Marjorie Hillis. My favourite case study is on the importance of graciously accepting gifts from your admirers, which describes a young woman who finds herself innocently browsing in a hotel gift shop with one of the older executives from her company and ends up going home with a chaffing dish. What a totally natural way to show aesthetic appreciation for a beautiful colleague.
But then Brown breaks out into what she is actually passionate about: careers and independence. Brown didn’t marry until her late thirties and while numerous affairs from her single years are alluded to, it’s clear her career was her great passion. And this is where her ageless advice kicks in on building a career, economizing (no penny passed through her fingers without being pinched and I love her for it), setting up home, entertaining, and taking care of yourself. Brown was a nut for exercise, healthy eating, and staying slim but, refreshingly, she really does seem to put health first ahead of dieting. After years of ailments and sluggishness, she discovered supplements and became evangelical about them, alongside practical healthy eating advice. For overweight readers, she believes counselling can do a world of good to help address what causes them to overeat. I’m not sure any modern advice book could do better.
In the office, she has hardnosed advice that applies just as well to today’s workplaces. There is no substitute for hard work and she exhorts readers to dig themselves in when they find that magical mix of a company and a boss they love working for. Her explanation on how to get raises is the exact same way most of my raises and my friends’ raises are still got today (timeline included):
The only way I know to get a raise is to be so good they can’t get anybody like you for the same money, or even slightly more, so they may as well give it to you. It may take six months while they check the vaults to be certain that extra twenty-five bucks isn’t going to bankrupt the company. Stay on their tail!
And while this is a book that is (sometimes) about how to sleep with men, your boss is not the man she wants you going after. Careers are good (or great) and sex is good (or mediocre) but to have them in close proximity is not:
…these gains are precarious. If anything happens to him, the next boss may not be so susceptible to your charms and you’ll be right back in the file room. As for going from company to company in search of susceptible bosses…quelle bore! You would probably do yourself more real good by staying right where you are and learning to read a statistical report. After all, girls to go to bed with he can always find. No real training is required, but where is a boss going to get a girl who can read statistical reports?
This, readers, is what I think Brown’s real agenda was: to get women confidentially into the workforce, the place where she found so much happiness and purpose during her single twenties and thirties:
…while you’re waiting to marry, or if you never marry, a job can be your love, your happy pill, your means of finding out who you are and what you can do, your play pen, your family, your entrée to a good social life, men and money, the most reliable escape from loneliness (when one more romance goes pfft), and your means of participating, not having your nose pressed to the glass.
If you had fun along the way slipping into bed with an admirer or stoking a lengthy affair, how wonderful. But better still to be confident in your own self and your own abilities, with a man as an adornment rather than a life’s purpose
This sounds like a lot of fun! And yeah, somehow more enlightened than the Cosmo magazines I read as a young woman…
Brown was the editor of Cosmo from the mid-sixties to mid-nineties so clearly was not entirely enlightened but, for 1962, it’s fairly revolutionary stuff.
I loved Live Alone and Like It, but I expect it’s unobtainable now! First published 1936 and my reprint cost me 10 pence some years ago…
Happily, it’s very easily obtainable, along with Orchids on Your Budget, from Virago!
Oh wow this does sound fun – and you’re right, all the other 1962 books have NOTHING to tell us in comparison.
I will admit that Solzhenitsyn had some fairly important stuff to share with the world in 1962 but even the impact of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was a small wave compared to this tsunami.
Not at all what I would have expected as to its actual message but yes, definitely the social history that Simon and Karen might have been hoping for! As well, I feel more educated for knowing what was in this book.
It’s definitely a fascinating bit of history!
Ah, memories. I read that back when it first came out.
I can only imagine what a bombshell it must have been!
This sounds really interesting – a mixture of stuff which might have dated and stuff which is really still relevant. Thanks for choosing it!
It’s such a great piece of social history! It seems I’m making a habit for the reading clubs of picking self-help books, but they always give such an interesting perspective on what people were worrying about at the time.