Editor who revived Cosmopolitan and championed women dies aged 90

A renowned magazine editor who helped usher in a sexual revolution has died at the age of 90.

For more than 30 years, Helen Gurley Brown made Cosmopolitan famous for its cover lines encouraging women to have sex, regardless of their marital status.

Her aim, she said, was to tell the reader:

Brown was hired by Hearst Magazines to turn around Cosmopolitan at a time when it had very few readers and had fallen below the 800,000 reader mark - the level guaranteed to advertisers.

But after just four issues circulation began to rise along with the cover price.

Sales grew every year until peaking at just over three million in 1983. It then slowly levelled off to 2.5 million.

Helen Gurley Brown was born in February 1922 in the Ozarks mountains in Arkansas. She grew up in the Depression and earned pocket money by giving other children dance lessons.

Her father died when she was 10 and her mother, a teacher, moved the family to Los Angeles.

She went through 18 jobs in seven years at places like the Daily News in Los Angeles, and, in 1948, the Foote, Cone & Belding advertising agency. There, when finally given a shot at writing.

She married at the age of 37 to twice-divorced David Brown, a former Cosmopolitan managing editor turned movie producer, whose credits would include "The Sting" and "Jaws."

Her husband encouraged Brown to write a book, which she wrote on weekends, and suggested the title, "Sex and the Single Girl."

They moved to New York after the book became one of the top sellers of 1962.

Brown ended her role as editor 1997, but stayed on as Editor-in-Chief of the magazine's foreign editions.

She died on Monday at a hospital in New York shortly after being taken ill.