Betsy VonToya
Released February 2025
Cosmopolitan Magazine had been around, amazingly, since the late 19th century. It wasn’t until a thirty something secretary who couldn’t make it anywhere else got hired as the chief editor that it really began to manage social and economic tensions for young single women in the 1960s and early 70s. It defined a discourse for women that was idealogical and served a segment of society within the middle class or class of women who just couldn’t make it anywhere else. It was not “produced” by individual authors or people, but the input it carried into the minds of its takers was it’s production line.
Cosmopolitan Magazine articulated a girl style American Dream that promised transcendence from class and sexual roles laid out by the post World War 2 era. Helen Gurley Brown knew how to get through the emotional, social and business issues that girls have to deal with so they could “have a better life”. She defined “her girl”, her target audience, as the girl who wants it.
And so, a choice was born. And Cosmo offered advise on how to have encounters with men who were not their husbands, how to attract the best ones, date them, and eventually marry them. This era coincided with the invention of birth control. A whole new wave of Feminism, referred to as the second wave feminism..
