Helen Gurley Brown: Nobody's Mouseburger
I loved how she wrote about the "mouseburgers," the plain women of the world, and her ideas on how they could get ahead in life. (That's how she saw herself.)

Tracie Egan Morrissey writes at Jezebel about trailblazer Brown, who just died at 90:

Despite the release of Bad Girls Go Everywhere, Jennifer Scanlon's 2009 full-length biography of HGB, hailing her as a feminist icon, the late editor still doesn't seem to get the respect she deserves--even in death. In a piece about HGB this week for the Washington Post, Kathleen Parker suggests that we "not take her seriously," deriding her beliefs as "stiletto feminism" and bitchily referencing her breast implants and disinterest in having children as evidence that she was some selfish, immature dilettante.

But HGB's early life was an inspiration for the creation of Mad Men's resident blossoming feminist Peggy Olsen, according to the show's creator Matthew Weiner. She worked her way up from the secretary pool to copywriter at an advertising agency after her boss noticed her talents.

She didn't marry until she was 37, which was considered bizarre in 1959. Even after she was married (to the same man for over 50 years) she chose having a career over having a family and never regretted the decision. That's not how women are supposed to be! Not even modern women! We're supposed to "have it all," or at least want to have it all.

Having it all--a phrase that's been the bane of feminism for three decades--means having a career and a family, or so we've been told. Oddly, though, not by HGB, who was the one who actually coined the term in the early '80s with her book Having It All: Love, Success, Sex, Money Even If You're Starting With Nothing.

"You can have it all," she later said. "And it's a hell of a lot of work. And it causes considerable stress. I never, so to speak, had it all. But I had my all, which is what I wanted: work and love."

...But part of what made HGB such a trailblazer was that, unlike other feminists, she didn't see high heels and dresses and lipstick and blow jobs as the shackles that bind us to a prison of traditional womanhood, but rather, part of what enables us to revel in the fun of femininity. And that can be really liberating.

...That she managed to piss off both Serious Feminists and traditionalists alike only proves that, in many ways, HGB was ahead of her time.

More on Brown here.