Cosmo turns 40

In 1965, writer Helen Gurley Brown broke ground with her sassy new version of a magazine created as a general interest publication in 1886. By the mid-’60s, Cosmopolitan was dying. Brown, author of the 1962 bestseller Sex and the Single Girl, was hired to resuscitate the moribund mag.
She was at times unsure of herself as an editor, weeping on the shoulder of her husband, David Brown, a journalist and later a Hollywood producer (Jaws, Chocolat, Angela’s Ashes). But Brown had a mission: to show women they didn’t have to be married to have sex and didn’t have to be married by 21 to feel fulfilled.
…That gospel was: sex, beauty, sex, fashion, sex, relationships, sex, fun, sex. Brown’s first issue included an article on birth control at a time when contraception was helping put women on an equal sexual playground with men.

“Within 10 years, the mystique of the single girl had replaced the myth of the happy housewife,” says [Georganne] Scheiner [associate professor of women and gender studies at Arizona State University], who teaches the cultural impact of Cosmo.