Get in on the ground floor, sister.

Born in January, 1946, this is exactly what Sue Ellen Browder, author of Subverted, did. That birthdate placed her at the headwaters of the Baby Boom, handing her the all the Baby-Boom benefits. You know, the sexual revolution, feminism, abortion.

It’s also the memoir of a small-town girl with big-city dreams. Browder stood at the magazine racks of Rexall Drugs in her Iowa hometown and dreamed of stepping into the glossy pages of the fashion magazines.

After journalism school, she helped create those pages, accepting a writing job that turned out to be Cosmopolitan Magazine.

Talk about the nerve center of the sexual revolution.

Cosmo was the fun & games end of the women’s movement, gals removing their bras for entirely different reasons than their more serious sisters over at the National Organization for Women — NOW. Browder sat in the movement’s back rooms, or knows the people who did. So she’s got tales to tell.

At NOW, they were all about equal opportunity for women. Browder got on board, heart and soul, thanks to getting fired from a pre-Cosmo job for pregnancy.  At that time, the women’s movement was all about Betty Friedan’s book, The Feminine Mystique, in which she coined the term “the problem with no name.” The movement she started made some big promises. “Strong, happily married women would be serenely fulfilled by their creative, lucrative work. Men and women would freely love one another in collaboration as equals. Mothers would be respected and honored both at home and in the workforce. All children would be wanted and cherished.”

Nobody thought to place abortion on the liberated woman’s wishlist until a man named Larry Lader gained Friedan’s ear. “At that time, most abortion advocates were white, upper-middle-class men, primarily doctors and lawyers. If a bunch of radical women appeared to take over the abortion movement, Bernie [Dr. Bernard Nathanson, Lader’s friend and fellow plotter] feared that moderate legislators and judges (again the vast majority of them men) would dismiss abortion reform without a fair hearing.” Once Lader convinced Friedan, the women’s movement entwined itself with the sexual revolution.

And a cadre of NOW members walked, horrified, out of the conference where Friedan introduced the abortion plank of the organization’s platform. Among them was Betty Boyer, who may have done more to secure your female equality than Friedan ever did. Watch Browder in this video  to learn more about Boyer.

At any rate, Browder kept busy at her typewriter, churning out articles those steamy articles. Each and every one slanted toward the lifestyle that Cosmo editor Helen Gurley Brown (married but childless) cheered on, that of the sexually free, make-up-and-clothes-and-lingerie-buying young career woman. In case you never guessed it, all the stories were fabrications, stuffed with fake quotes from fake experts. But Gurley Brown had a persona to sell. And Browder wanted the job.

Meanwhile, on the home front, Browder lived with a loving, supportive and steady husband. She bore two children and loved mothering them. It was hardly the Cosmo girl life but it was a happy one. She buried the dissonance of telling lies, cashed the paychecks and rode the ‘60s-’70s-’80s wave of society-changing ideas.

Until she couldn’t anymore.

I’ll leave it to you to discover how and why she hit the wall.

Photo credit: broken thoughts on VisualHunt.com / CC BY-NC-SA