Helen Gurley Brown, the legendary editor of Cosmopolitan magazine and the unblushing champion of women’s sexual liberation, died on Monday at ninety years old. She was an endlessly quotable, endlessly contradictory icon who enraged conservatives for corrupting the morals of America even as she frustrated feminists by promoting retrograde views on women, sex and power. Even her New York Times obituary couldn’t resist a jab at her embrace of plastic surgery: “She was 90, but parts of her were considerably younger.” An energetic and self-made trailblazer, Brown transformed women’s lives, providing them with a new model of femininity and a new mantra of freedom: good girls go to heaven, bad girls go everywhere.

According to Nora Ephron, another recently departed icon, Helen Gurley Brown and her magazine were impossible to ignore, and infuriating precisely because she knew how to sell you, over and over again, on the same fantasy of self-improvement, even though you knew you were being suckered: “How can you be angry at someone who’s got your number?” Originally published in Esquire in 1970, Ephron’s essay appears in her collection "Wallflower at the Orgy," titled with a Brown quote that encapsulates her subject’s earnestness and ear for a catchphrase: “If You’re a Little Mouseburger, Come With Me. I Was a Mouseburger And I Will Help You.” Ephron, who herself wrote for Cosmopolitan in the 1960s, chases after the birdlike, bejeweled editor’s many contradictions, fascinated by her message of self-made success and her obsession, at the same time, with her own faults and flaws -- and by extension, those of her readers.

In the wake of her 1962 bestseller "Sex and the Single Girl," Brown took over the flailing Cosmopolitan magazine, and remade it in her own image -- or rather, in the image she had invented for herself, the Cosmo girl, who knows what she wants (sex, love, a career, a hot body and killer shoes) and will use any means necessary to get it. She was not an idealist: while she fiercely supported equal pay for women, she also believed, pragmatically, that the gender gap wouldn’t be closed anytime soon, so her readers were perfectly entitled to take dinners and gifts from men to make up the deficit. In this gimlet-eyed view of sexual economics, as in most of her theories, she was drawing from life.

Helen Gurley was born in Arkansas in 1922, to parents who were schoolteachers until her father was elected to the state legislature and moved the family to Little Rock, only to be killed in a freak accident at the state capitol when Helen was ten. Although the family was doing well at that point, especially by the standards of the time, Helen tended to exaggerate her hardscrabble background, perhaps to better measure her own progress. She moved with her mother and sister to California after her father’s death, and when they returned to Arkansas, Helen stayed behind as a single girl in Los Angeles. She was obsessively frugal and a tireless worker, climbing from secretary to copywriter at the Foote, Cone & Belding ad agency by the mid-1950s: the prototype for Mad Men’s Peggy Olson. Cosmo’s indelible titles and cover lines, so easy to mock and mimic, were a product of her career in advertising and her ability to take any subject -- acne, abortion, eyeshadow, affairs, orgasms -- shrink it, and box it up for sale.

Today her brand is everywhere, from Sex and the City to the global Cosmopolitan empire, profiled recently in the New York Times. Right up until her death, Brown was listed as editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan editions from Azerbaijan to South Korea, and she directed operations from “a delightfully incongruous pink corner office” in the Hearst Tower. (Her color scheme and status changed over the years -- Nora Ephron describes her “yellow-and-orange office across the street from Hearst headquarters.”)

In her biography of Brown, "Bad Girls Go Everywhere," Jennifer Scanlon argues that she deserves recognition and respect for the possibilities that she, and Cosmo, opened up for women of all backgrounds. Unlike her feminist contemporaries, who wanted to help women collectively, “Brown believed not in overthrowing the system but rather, in working it,” and despite her manifold neuroses, she had no patience for anything like victimhood.

Although none came close to matching or eclipsing "Sex and the Single Girl" for influence, Brown published eleven books in her lifetime, and their titles, including "Sex at the Office" (1965) and "Sex and the New Single Girl" (1970), reveal that she knew she was on to a good thing. All her books draw heavily on her life, and her 2000 memoir "I’m Wild Again: Snippets from My Life and a Few Brazen Thoughts" reads like the continuation of the intimate, inspirational, and wildly funny conversation she had with her readers and disciples for sixty years.