Helen Gurley Brown

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Photo courtesy of T magazine

Helen Gurley Brown, the longtime editor in chief of Cosmopolitan and groundbreaking author of Sex and the Single Girl, died in New York on Monday. She was 90 years old.

"Helen Gurley Brown was an icon. Her formula for honest and straightforward advice about relationships, career, and beauty revolutionized the magazine industry," said Hearst CEO Frank A. Bennack Jr. in a statement. "She lived every day of her life to the fullest and will always be remembered as the quintessential 'Cosmo girl.' She will be greatly missed."

Brown edited Cosmopolitan for 32 years and wrote books on everything from sex, love, and relationships to money and success. She was also widely admired for her sharp wit. In 2007, when Vanity Fair asked which historical figure she identified with most, Brown replied, "Cleopatra. She was a good boss and had a good love life."

The same, undoubtedly, can be said of Brown. See a sampling of her seemingly endless supply of quotes and witticisms, below.

"Nearly every glamorous, wealthy, successful career woman you might envy now started out as some kind of schlep."

"You cannot sit around like a cupcake asking other people to come and eat you up and discover your great sweetness and charm. You've got to make yourself more cupcakable all the time so you're a better cupcake to be gobbled up."

"Good girls go to heaven; bad girls go everywhere."

"One of the paramount reasons for staying attractive is so you can have somebody to go to bed with."

"Never fail to know that if you are doing all the talking, you are boring somebody."

"My success was not based so much on any great intelligence but on great common sense."

"You can have your titular recognition. I'll take money and power."

"I address everybody as 'pussycat,' but nobody minds, and it's a nice term of endearment."

"There has been lots of copying — look at Glamour. I used to have all the sex to myself."

"The message was: So you're single. You can still have sex. You can have a great life. And if you marry, don't just sponge off a man or be the gold-medal-winning mother. Don't use men to get what you want in life — get it for yourself."

Iconic author and editor Helen Gurley Brown died today at age 90. Helen is known as the woman who brought sex to the masses, with her best-seller Sex and the Single Girl in 1962, and then by leading Cosmopolitan as editor in chief from 1965 until 1997.

After 50 years of marriage, Helen Gurley Brown's husband, David Brown, died in 2010. Despite the make-yourself populism Helen promoted to women each month in Cosmo, she credited much to her husband in 2008, saying, "I owe him everything. I wouldn't be who I am or achieved what I did." Of course, what made them each successful was not the other but their partnership. David convinced Helen to write Sex and the Single Girl; he published Cosmo for the first few years while she edited it. It was a marriage of collaboration and mutual respect, so let's look at some of Helen's secrets for making it work.

• Choose wisely: "Marry a decent, good, kind person who will cherish you."
• Always say yes to sex: "If only one of you is in the mood, do it. Even if sex isn’t great every time, it's a unique form of communication and togetherness that can help you stay together with a good degree of contentment."
• Depend on each other: "Marriage is insurance for the worst years of your life. During your best years you don't need a husband."
• Communicate, maniacally: "If you listen to your mate maniacally well, you can’t go wrong."
• Except when it comes to orgasms: "There's enough trouble having a man in your life without saying, 'Look, I didn't have an orgasm last night.'"

Cosmo magazine was the guest of honor Monday night when celebrities, the media, and pro-choice people who attend galas gathered to celebrate the pill's 50th birthday. Its magazines covered the walls, and its editor spoke but not before comedienne Samantha Bee took a stab at the old rag. It's the "publisher of all the hard news that other magazines are afraid to touch," she said. "Like, 'The Dumbest Thing You Can Do to Your Boobs.' And 'Are You Enough of a Bad Girl?'"

We've already discussed how Helen Gurley Brown turned Cosmo into feminism for the working girl in the '60s. She advised women to use their looks to get ahead, because that was better than the alternative of depending on men. She had a point, but it's no longer valid.

So what did Cosmo's current editor, Kate White, have to say? Find out below.

It's hard to imagine calling a woman who once said "man-pleasing gets results" a feminist, but Helen Gurley Brown has had the word attached to her bra strap since Sex and the Single Girl published in 1962. In April, a biography on her, Bad Girls Go Everywhere, hit the shelves to solidify her place as a feminist icon, raising more than one eyebrow across the blogosphere.

So she doesn't have the intellectual clout of a Naomi Wolf, but what she did have — for 32 years — was the ear of the everyday woman. She described her upbringing as "hillbilly," and pedaled a populist feminism that was meant to be practiced instead of preached. It obviously resonated with American women, as Cosmopolitan outsold feminist Ms. six to one when she was editor in chief.

Brown saw nothing wrong with using looks to get ahead and believed that a woman should be free to be a CEO, housewife, or model without society's commentary. But then she'd go and say something like, "I think you may have to have a tiny touch of anorexia nervosa to maintain an ideal weight."

So who is Helen Gurley Brown? An feminist icon, or a woman who served a purpose in a place and time that are neither here nor now?