EARLIER this week, and before the developments at Marikana in the North West struck us dumb with shock, we shared a moment's silence to reflect upon the passing of a pioneering feminist and to express gratitude, not only for the revolution she single-handedly brought about, but for the sheer impact her ideas have had on so many of our lives.
True, there are those who may disagree with the official position at the Mahogany Ridge that our debt to Helen Gurley Brown is immeasurable, and it is perhaps not surprising that there have already been several attempts to belittle and poke fun at her legacy. Even the usually staid New York Times joined in the snarkiness. The legendary Cosmopolitan editor, their obituary noted, "was 90, though parts of her were considerably younger."
Brown's critics took her to task for her apolitical stance on many issues of the day. If she had any politics, the Times said, it was that of personal advancement. "The advice she offered Cosmopolitan's readers on winning the right friends and influencing the right people was squarely in the tradition of Dale Carnegie, if less vertically inclined."
But this was precisely where Brown got it right. She institutionalised the philosophy that it was perfectly acceptable for single women to go out and actively get laid.
In her groundbreaking book, Sex and the Single Girl, published in 1962 and long before she took over as editor of Cosmopolitan and long before the appearance of other "seminal" feminist texts, she urged women to be financially independent and sexually satisfied before bothering themselves with the more traditional concerns of homemaking and motherhood.
For the early 1960s, this was beyond radical, it was immoral and even worse -- I remember, as a conscript in the late 1970s, being told that such behaviour was all part of a communist plot -- but Brown's "stiletto feminism", as her detractors put it, would eventually come to define the modern, single, liberated woman. Many of us at the Ridge have played an active role in that liberation, selflessly (and gratefully) lending a hand -- and other bits -- when duty called.