Monica Puscasu

Course: Cultural studies

MEFIC Anul 2
Essay on “Inventing the Cosmo Girl: class identity and girl-style American dreams”
Author: Laurie Ouellette

Cosmoplitan or the how the feminism of the 60s shaped the world we live in today

This essay will look into Laurie Ouelette’s essay on the the power of the Cosmo girl and how one book
and one magazine shaped a generation of women. After a short summary of the article and its main
ideas, this paper will look into how a generation was first defined by the Cosmo magazine and the
Cosmo woman and how the Cosmo ideal evolved today,
To understand how Brown shaped the modern world, let’s look at her achievements. Helen Gurley
Brown was a former secretary who rose to fame with the help of her book “Sex and the Single Girl”.
The book, mocked by intellectuals was published in 1962, when Brown was already 42. Almost
entirely based on her own experience, as a woman, who held 18 secretarial jobs before getting the job
as a copywriter and later marryin the book offered a wide diversity of advice, raging from the
appearance of a woman, budget planning, working, but it focused heavily on flirting and using ones
body to climb up the social and economic ladder. Women were told how to attract rich men in order to
marry the best one. The book heavily critiqued motherhood, divorce and most of all encouraged
women to work and advised women on how to achieve sexual and financial independence, ideas that
were later picked on by the Cosmopolitan magazine and adapted for a wider public.
The article by Ouellette analyzes the impact the book and the magazine had on women in the 60s and
70s and how it shifted the perspective from women being dependent on men, to women taking charge
both in the household, as well as in the workplace and private life. Though she constructed “the phony”
as an empty shell, it offered women a new way of thinking and acting in a male-dominated world.
The chapter “The beautiful phony” discusses how feminity was heavily linked to consumption as “she
subverted long-standing moral discourses by instructing women to use crafted feminine attributes to
achieve covert advantages in the field of heterosexual romance” (p.7) While other magazines were
promoting the ideals of the passive woman, Cosmopolitan ushered in the idea of “the transformative
power of artifice”, where women could be molded and created, a pattern which today has been taken to
a new level in the age of the social media. Today there are entire industries which heavily rely on the
idea that through “artifices” women can become better version of themselves, like the Goop, which
promotes beauty through the artifice of wellness or entire skincare and makeup brands that rely on
women’s insecurities and desire to change to promote an artificial beauty standard. The “artifices” that
Brown refers to have developed into entire industries half a century later and the idea that through hard
work and dedication one can transform into an ideal version of oneself has been taken to new extremes
with the help of cosmetic operations and makeup that turn every commoner into a star. Brown talks
about “what any girls can do if she really tries” and her values are true today as they were in the 70s.
With the rise of cosmetic surgery, now any girl can emulate the fashion models and wealthy women
Brown describes. The padded bra she talks about is now the monthly botox injections , the capped teeth
are the old fillers and so on.
And the women today have turned into literal temples of artificiality were everything is made up and
reconstructed, thus Brown’s idea shaping the values of the modern Instagram star.
While Brown molded the older generation, the Cosmo woman still exists today. Though some ideals
like the search for a husband have faded away, women are still encouraged, even forced in some
industries to use artifices to become better versions of themselves. Some industries even rely on women
desiring to be better version of themselves and given that the beauty industry is one of the highest
grossing ones today, one can safely say that the Cosmo girl is still very much present.