Dawn Eden has an interesting piece on the Cosmo Girl’s decadence, and a curious and hopeful turn at the end of her life.
On a societal level, the fallout from the Cosmo philosophy helped turn modern Western society into what John Paul II described in his “Letter to Families” as a “culture of use,” where “woman [becomes] an object for man, children a hindrance to parents, the family an institution obstructing the freedom of its members.” While Helen Gurley Brown insisted that sex for the single girl equaled “love” and “romance,” John Paul said that separating sex from the context of spousal self-gift reduces it to “a man’s and a woman’s mutual ‘use’ of each other.”
But then there’s this:
Although she attended Protestant church services during her youth, Helen Gurley Brown as an adult dismissed religious faith. She was fond of saying that “good girls go to heaven; bad girls go everywhere.” All the more surprising, then, that two years before the end of her life, she was moved to donate $1 million of her bad-girl fortune to a heavenly cause. Instead of writing yet another check to NARAL, she opted to give the seven-figure sum to Cardinal Hayes High School, a Catholic school for boys in the Bronx.
There’s a very interesting ending – and do look at the picture on the steps of Saint Patrick’s in New York.
This article, Helen Gurley Brown — With A Twist is a post from The Bellarmine Forum.
https://bellarmineforum.org/helen-gurley-brown-with-a-twist/
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