Labor of Love (18 page)

“Your most prodigious work will be on
you
—at home,” Brown instructed. “You can't afford to leave any facet of you unpolished.”

In asides that are no doubt meant to be endearing, she hints at the rigors of her own beauty routine. “When I got married, I moved in with six-pound dumbbells, slant board, an electronic device for erasing wrinkles, several pounds of soy lecithin, powdered calcium and yeast-liver concentrate, for Serenity Cocktails and enough high-powered vitamins to generate life in a statue,” she says.

Brown encourages Single Girls to treat their jobs as opportunities to meet men, just as the working-class Shopgirls who came before them did. However, Brown tells readers that ideally they perform this work with no end in sight. Shopgirls aspired to find husbands to save them from the sales floor. But the ambitious Single Girl reverses their priorities. She sees her desire for men as a kind of engine to make herself work harder.

“Managements who think that romances lower the work output are right out of their skulls,” Brown exclaimed. “A girl in love with her boss will knock herself out seven days a week and wish there were more days.”

Sex and the Office
also extolled work as the highest moral virtue. It is through work on her person, as well as her professional image, that a Single Girl comes to deserve the delights that come her way. “Your goal is a sexy office life with marvelous things happening to you,” Brown says, “and these don't accrue to girls who are
slugs
.”

In an earlier era, Shopgirls had aspired to attain the glamour of a life of ease. Brown made doing endless labor look like the most glamorous thing imaginable. The highest goal, in this worldview, is not actual companionship but
desirability
. The Single Girls Brown writes about work hard to accrue the attraction of men like currency. The men themselves seem interchangeable.

“Use them,” Brown exhorts her reader, “in a perfectly nice way just as they use you.”

Playboy
was all for it. Hugh Hefner ended up being one of Brown's biggest advocates. Her insistence that regular gals were interested in sex encouraged
Playboy
readers that “the pulchritudinous Playmates” they admired were not “a world apart.” They were everywhere.

“Potential Playmates are all around you,” the editors wrote. “The new secretary at your office, the doe-eyed beauty who sat opposite you at lunch yesterday, the girl who sells you shirts and ties at your favorite store. We found Miss July in our circulation department, processing subscriptions, renewals, and back copy orders.”

Brown promised that if you just worked hard enough, you might be the girl lucky enough to get plucked up by the powers that were, to become the ultimate
Sex and the Office
success story—a nationally recognizable pornographic star.

*   *   *

It is easy to imagine why a young woman facing down a lifetime spent making beds and sandwiches and grocery shopping and watching the light change until dinner and then getting drubbed nightly by the same man in missionary position might find the life Helen Gurley Brown described appealing. But as a solution to the problems that Friedan had diagnosed, it was shortsighted.

On the surface,
The Feminine Mystique
and
Sex and the Single Girl
seem like very different books. One is set in suburbia; the other takes place in the city. The narrator of one is a bored housewife; the heroine of the other is a sexually liberated career girl. Yet the two books share more in common than it seems. Both embraced the idea that once individual women took paid work outside their homes, all women's problems would be solved.

Both also shared the same blind spot. They imagined that “allowing” women to work would eliminate gender inequality.

The opportunities that certain women gained in the 1960s to work outside their homes and earn money did give them choices. As Brown emphasized, Single Girls could now support themselves. They had the income to buy all kinds of things—particularly if they opted not to have children. But this freedom to choose how they spent their time and money did not end gender inequality. It simply gave women a chance to work harder trying to break even in a system that was rigged against them.

Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, but she did it backward and in high heels
, the saying goes. The Single Girl was told to do everything a Playboy did while making herself into a Playmate as well.

To put it slightly differently, the sexually liberated woman whom Brown describes does not get out of the predicament of having her worth defined by men. In the end, the
Cosmo
girl was not so different from the Steady who desperately fended off her boyfriend in the backseat of his car. The one was told that she had to parry male desire. The other was told that she had to attract it constantly. Neither convention produced any model of what a woman who was an
agent
of desire might look like.

Black feminists and working-class feminists tended to be much more perceptive than their white middle-class counterparts about the limitations of Fun Fearless Feminism. Because African American women had always worked outside their homes, ever since their ancestors were brought to the United States as slaves, they did not mistake the “opportunity” to work as an adequate solution to all the problems that women had to deal with.

To work or not to work had only ever been a choice for a very limited part of the population. The rest knew that earning a wage was not a fix-all. In fact, many black feminists attested that
in
their homes was the only place that they felt respite from a racist world.

When the young black writer Gloria Watkins published her first book,
Feminist Theory
, in 1984 under the pen name bell hooks, she faulted Betty Friedan's school of feminism for its obliviousness of the majority of American women.

“Friedan's famous phrase, ‘the problem that has no name,' … actually referred to the plight of a select group of college-educated, middle- and upper-class, married white women—housewives bored with leisure, with the home, with children, with buying products, who wanted more out of life,” hooks wrote. “The one-dimensional perspective on women's reality presented in her book became a marked feature of the contemporary feminist movement.”

The new feminine mystique that Brown hyped has also persisted. Cultural icons from Britney Spears to Sheryl Sandberg still tell young women that, for them, the prerequisite to a good life is an insatiable appetite for effort.

As a teen, the pop star entreated an imaginary boyfriend to “hit her one more time” and panted that she was “a slave 4 him.” But after marriage, children, divorce, and a very public nervous breakdown, her comeback album celebrated Single Girl self-reliance. “You'd better work … work … work … work…,” she intoned in her hit single “Work, B*tch.” Sandberg offers the same advice to young female professionals in
Lean In
. When the going gets tough, she says, “keep a foot on the gas pedal.” If working does not work, work harder. A worthy girl always has more to give.

*   *   *

If Fun Fearless Feminism failed to address the concerns of so many women, then what explains its success? It was market-friendly. This brand of feminism can be used to sell almost anything.

During the 1960s and '70s, Virginia Slims turned feminism into an advertising slogan.
You've come a long way, baby!
meant: You have come far enough to be able to buy the gender you were assigned at birth back in the form of special cigarettes. Companies fell over themselves to capture the earnings of the Fun Fearless Female. They sold her back her labor as liberation. Today we can thank them for ads that brand everything from pens to dildos to political candidates who oppose reproductive rights as “empowered.”

Cosmopolitan
continues to speak as if having choices were the same thing as having power. Its signature feature is the list. Every single issue lists dozens of Ways You Can Please Your Man. That the same tips show up, worded slightly differently each month, should tip us off that our choices may not be as infinite as the constant updates imply, and that they may have less to do with fulfilling our needs than with fulfilling those of the magazine to sell issues. Read one, and you will find that there are fewer choices than the cover led you to believe. Almost invariably, many are rewordings of the last month's choices. At least three will involve applying pressure to the prostate.

Most important,
your
pleasure rarely makes the list.
Cosmo
not infrequently lists, as one of the main reasons to enjoy sex, the fact that
men like women who like having it
.

Brown was progressive in her positivity about sex. But she did not challenge a view of the world in which women were there to offer recreation to men
.
Part of the ways they were supposed to make things easy was by performing the familiar role of the woman-as-object. Brown did not call the power structures that enforced sexism into question. On the contrary, she directly told her readers that it was morally imperative, as well as professionally strategic, to accept these structures and work them to her advantage.

“I don't feel there's any justifiable cause to criticize a boss ever,” she declared in
Sex and the Office
. “You must love him like crazy. Denying love and devotion to a good boss who spends eight hours a day with you would be like a yellow-breasted mother swamp finch denying worms to her yellow-breasted swamp-finch babies.”

The opening pages of
Sex and the Single Girl
belie that although Brown encourages her readers to revel in their sexual freedoms, these freedoms do not make them independent. The book begins with a boast.

“I married for the first time at thirty-seven,” Brown writes. “It
could
be construed as something of a miracle considering how old
I
was and how eligible
he
was.” She goes on to tell us that her husband is a successful Hollywood producer and that she herself did not start out with any unfair advantages. She was not unusually pretty and did not grow up with money; she did not go to college.

“But
I
don't think it's a miracle that I married my husband. I think I deserve him! For seventeen years I worked hard to become the kind of woman who might interest him,” she exclaims.

Before we embark on the adventure of single girlhood with her as our guide, she wants us to know why we should trust her: In the end, she did get her prince.

Given the choice between housework and working like a son of a bitch, it becomes easy to understand why a young woman might say “Fuck it,” toss her Valium and soy lecithin, and head for the West Coast.

*   *   *

The second version of the sexual revolution was more radical than the one
Playboy
and
Cosmo
developed. The hippies of the 1960s were not the first Americans to call themselves free lovers. The country has a long history of countercultural movements gathering forces beneath that banner. The white abolitionist Frances Wright established its first “free love” commune in 1825. She invited freed slaves and abolitionists to live and work together in a community that had no marriage and no expectation of monogamy.

Many nineteenth-century Marxists, anarchists, and feminists denounced marriage as a form of “sexual slavery” or prostitution. They rejected the idea of private romantic contracts that, they said, led men and women to treat one another like property. These critics recognized the fundamental inequality on which marriage rested: economic conventions and divorce laws that heavily favored men. The fact that many wives had no means of earning money outside the home meant that they had to sit tight while their husbands screwed around. If a man left a woman, he lost only her. But if she left him, her livelihood dried up.

In the 1870s, Victoria Woodhull, an activist who became the first female candidate to run for president of the United States, campaigned on a free love platform.

“Yes, I am a Free Lover,” Woodhull told her audience in an 1871 speech. “I have an inalienable, constitutional and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or as short a period as I can; to change that love every day if I please, and with that right neither you nor any law you can frame have any right to interfere.”

By this, Woodhull meant that women should have rights to marry and divorce freely. She argued that instead of economic needs and social obligations, affection and choice should govern loving relationships. But she recognized that in order for free love to flourish, the individuals who wanted to practice it would have to build new institutions to replace marriages and families.

She told her listeners in 1871 that she had a “right to demand a free and unrestricted exercise” of her right to love. “It is your duty not only to accord it, but, as a community, to see that I am protected in it.”

The mistrust of institutions felt by many young Americans during the aftermath of the Civil War made a powerful comeback during the Vietnam War. Once again young people turned toward free love in order to express their dissatisfaction with the world of their parents. But in contrast to Woodhull, they focused on what they wanted to destroy rather than what they wanted to build.

Young radicals in New York and San Francisco knew that they wanted something very different from the “sexy … successful life” that glossy magazines of the era promised. They did not want to grow up to be like their hypocritical fathers who pored over
Playboy
, or their stay-at-home mothers who sniffled when they found sticky issues stashed under the mattress. They did not want a more fun, fearless version of the society they had grown up in. They wanted a new world altogether. They were just not sure exactly how it should look.