Psyche! A subject line like that and all I want to write about is the nerdy history conference I attended today!

So, I got up at 7:30 this morning and went to the Organization of American Historians Conference at the Convention Center. The first session, the reason I went, was about Helen Gurley Brown and Gypsy Rose Lee and how they embodied "desire without boundaries." Helen Gurley Brown is maybe my new heroine, but I'll need to do more research and get back to you on that one. She wrote "Sex and the Single Girl" in 1962, which was a VERY DIFFERENT DAY AND AGE and suddenly, all the single ladies (shit. Just got Beyonce stuck in my head) had a voice. She told them that they were enviable, not pitiable, and that they should have as much fun as possible and only marry if they really really wanted to. And she's still Slate magazine's 13th most powerful American over 80. We don't know about her because the feminists of the time didn't like her because she was too mainstream, liked men too much, and because her book was chatty instead of serious and self-righteous. And she was all about consumerism and publicity- she was the highest paid advertising copywriter on the East Coast when the book came out. She and her publicist tried and tried to get the book banned by sending it to people who they thought might take the bait. It didn't work. But, regardless of the marketing tactics and the book's silliness, the historian today convinced me that Brown did just as much to make my life better as Betty Friedan, Adrienne Rich, and their ilk. I always suspected that the way to unfettered fun was paved by different means (or at least more means) than my women's studies professors would have had me believe. Those second-wave feminists (and my professors, and the girls in my classes) all seemed too whiny and man-haterish, or "reactive and isolated" if you want to be all academic about it, to have changed social norms. Those ladies weren't fun. Helen Gurley Brown was FUN! She probably still is. I probably need to read her book.

I think that I was the only single girl in her young 30's in the small audience, and the historian kept looking at me and smiling. That's the kind of historian I want to be when I grow up. Or maybe a mix between Helen Gurley Brown and that historian. hmmmmm