From Brown to Bradshaw

While reading the article “Inventing the Cosmo Girl: Class Identity and Girl-Style American Dreams” I couldn’t help but compare Cosmopolitan’s Helen Gurley Brown to the character of Carrie Bradshaw in the show Sex and the City. Carrie writes a weekly column called “Sex and the City” for the fictional paper The New York Star. The column talks of Carrie’s sexual escapades, dating, relationships, and the New York lifestyle, similar to that of Cosmopolitan’s material. Much like the audience of Sex and the City, “the aspirations of the Cosmo Girl [are], white, heterosexual, and upper-middle class” (121). “…working women [is] thus linked to their emergence as a consumer market capable of purchasing certain goods and services with their own wages” (119). The characters on this show all start out on their own, but are mysteriously able to afford designer labels and brands. “…the Cosmo Girl was often addressed as a have not, and was offered instructions to remedy the situation” (121), This is similar to Carrie’s column where she will usually leave the viewer with a question, but in the end the episode itself solves the problem (ex: The truth was, I was dying to sleep with him. But isn't delayed gratification the definition of maturity?). Both Sex and the City and Cosmopolitan address identity of consumerist women in an up-front way.