Born in 1922 in Green Forest, Arkansas, Helen Gurley entered a world in financial freefall that held very few options for women.  As a teenager, she moved to Los Angeles, and sent money back to her mother Cleo and her sister Mary in Arkansas for years. Helen worked impossibly hard. She was a Mad-Men style secretary at firms in LA until her writing skills were recognized, and she was promoted to a copywriter — one of the few female copywriters, and one who advanced quickly. 

She stayed unmarried longer than most women of her generation, favoring independence and the grind of hard work. In 1959, when she was almost 40, Helen Gurley married David Brown, a partner who recognized and supported her talents.

David encouraged Helen to publish her first and bestselling book Sex and the Single Girl in 1962 — soon followed by Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. Helen revitalized and remade Cosmopolitan magazine with phenomenal success as the chief editor for 32 years. Again, she was one of the few and earliest women in her position, and she took charge as a pioneer for women in journalism and publishing.

In Helen’s later years, she came to be involved with other Hearst employees in a decade long project with a baseball group made up of 20 young boys from the Bronx, NY called “The Outsiders Mentorship” program. Our BridgeUP programs are rooted in that mentorship program.

Helen helped establish the Foundation based on her lived experiences as a way to try and make a difference, one person at a time.