You may not realize this—but you and Carrie Bradshaw owe Helen Gurley Brown big time! If it wasn't for Helen, the fearless founder and longtime editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan magazine, and author of the earth-shattering bestseller, Sex and the Single Girl, you might well be TRAPPED!

TRAPPED in a world filled with now absurd-seeming ideas. Ideas like: you're a slut if you've had pre-marital sex, or if you've had sex with more than one partner, or if you're not married... by the age of 21.

So thank God for Helen, her once-revolutionary ideas and her bold determination to relentlessly articulate a better, more self-fulfilling life for women, which she did in every issue of Cosmo during her thirty-year tenure.

Now, Helen and her enormous—and for the most part unrecognized—contributions to the sexually and mentally liberated lives that you, Carrie, and your friends enjoy, has finally been recognized for her feminism and more, in a recently published bio Bad Girls Go Everywhere: The Life of Helen Gurley Brown, by Jennifer Scanlon.

It's a definite read, if you want some dramatic perspective on just how significantly women's lives have changed in just 60 years. If it wasn't for Helen, who grew up in the female-stifling 1940s and '50s, it's not only Sex and the City's Carrie Bradshaw who might not exist. There wouldn't be a Michelle Obama either.

Helen, more than any other woman in the world, made it aspirationally OK to be a career woman who could be the equal of any man, including her husband. At a time when most women worked briefly, if at all, before getting hitched and retiring into narrow lives as traditional wives and moms, Helen believed that work in itself was liberating for women. Career And Family: Can We Really Have Both?

Liberating because money gave women the financial independence to live their lives on their own terms. And Helen's experiences as a hardworking, ambitious career woman at a time when most working girls were relegated to low-level secretarial positions, and denied promotions and raises—think Mad Men—made her a relentless advocate for other working women throughout her time at Cosmo.

Despite the many roadblocks in her own career path, Helen kept on persevering, breaking through sexist barriers and finally landing a job as one of the first female copywriters in the advertising industry, before becoming a book author and magazine editor-in-chief.

Along the way, she discovered that "nothing is as much fun as achieving." A philosophy that Michelle Obama's been articulating to the female students she's been inviting to visit the White House since her husband's inauguration.