Linda Kelsey: I'm so glad I was a 'Cosmo' girl

Thirty years on, 'Cosmopolitan' is still holding its own against younger rivals. But then, as the former editor Linda Kelsey tells Joanna Briscoe, sex just never goes out of fashion

In terms of brand recognition, Cosmopolitan, that glossy bible of blow jobs, chlamydia and spike-heeled careers, is up there with the giants. It sums up an era, a look, an institution. It also happens to be 30 years old. To celebrate the fact, the former Cosmo editor Linda Kelsey has written Was It Good for You, Too?, a review of the magazine's past three decades that encapsulates the cultural history of the period and recalls the magazine's greatest hits.

Cosmo, of course, was the Sex and the City of its day, and its founder, Helen Gurley Brown, the Carrie Bradshaw. In fact, she wrote a book called Sex and the Single Girl, a bestseller whose ethos was siphoned three years later into the first, US edition of Cosmopolitan. In 1972, the monthly women's magazine was launched in the UK with Joyce Hopkirk as editor, shortly followed by Deirdre McSharry. Now, the 50th international edition of the magazine has just been launched, still overseen by the octogenarian editor-in-chief, Gurley Brown.

Two months after National Magazines' launch of British Cosmopolitan, Linda Kelsey arrived, aged 20. "There were only seven of us to start with," she says. "I worked on that magazine on and off for nearly 15 years, starting as a junior sub-editor and ending up as editor. It was such a pivotal time in my life personally, and pretty pivotal in young women's lives in terms of feminism and expressing their sexuality."

It's hard to remember an era in which feminism had barely dawned, and copulation – especially of the unmarried variety – was a taboo subject. Yet Cosmo burst through the barriers with features on "sleep-around" girls and what makes men fantastic lovers. Some 350,000 copies of the launch issue duly sold out by lunchtime; the print run was upped to 450,000 for the second issue, which featured a male nude centrefold, and which sold out in two days.

In those earliest days, says Kelsey, it was "just a very good-time. The best we could come up with about careers was how to find a job where the men are – if you got a job as a secretary in advertising, there'd be loads of really sexy blokes there who you could end up marrying."

The 12-year reign of Deirdre McSharry featured "acres of print": campaigns, career workshops, full-length fiction, words such as "fellatio" and names such as Irma Kurtz, Tom Crabtree and Erin Pizzey. McSharry typed her copy on pink paper. She presided over what was arguably Cosmo's greatest era: the every-girl handbook influenced a whole generation, whether it was to transcend the typing pool or develop an eating disorder. Kelsey still stands by Cosmo's debatable brand of feminism: "I think Cosmo did all that stuff, but in a very palatable way that didn't frighten the horses – the whole lipstick-feminism thing."

McSharry led the circulation to its peak of just less than 490,000; by the time Kelsey took the helm in 1985, sales had slumped to 370,000. Aids had arrived to spoil the sex fun, yet Kelsey managed to pull the circulation up. In the 1990s, editor Marcelle d'Argy Smith came in and "declared that sex was back". Her successor, Mandi Norwood, then introduced "lots of 'shock! horror!' stories". The current editor, Lorraine Candy, "has brought it back to basics in a way."

Of course, in Cosmo's heyday, it could flourish unchallenged in a market that featured merely Honey and Over 21. Nova collapsed two years after Cosmo's launch. There was no Elle, Marie Claire, New Woman, Red, Eve, InStyle or Glamour, and the celebrity magazine had yet to arrive. What is strange about the Cosmo of today is that, contrary to expectation, its ABC figures are sky-high. It may seem like a bright, brash dinosaur read by God-knows-who, but the July-December 2002 figure is 463,058. The figure for Marie Claire stands at 400,038, and for InStyle at 175,245. For most of its three decades, Cosmopolitan has been the towering market-leader. It was finally Glamour (latest ABC: 537,474) that broke the mould. But, as Kelsey says, "It's a different magazine. It's half the price, and it's very much fast food."

It would be impossible in today's climate for Cosmo to have the social significance it once did. But what has changed is the culture, the market, and not the magazine. "The things that have stayed constant in the magazine are the things that have actually enabled its success to endure," says Kelsey. "And I think it has always been fundamentally about relationships, which are always going to be of interest to women. If it went down the celebrity route, it just wouldn't do it as well as the celebrity magazines do. If it sold itself as a fashion and beauty magazine – well, plenty of others do that. Nobody does relationships like Cosmo does."

But is the product time-warped? "When Marie Claire first came out, it had a kind of badge of style, and panache about it, and I don't think that Cosmo has that, but the women who buy it clearly don't care. Because it isn't fashionable, I don't think it's ever going to go out of fashion."

After her reign at Cosmo, Kelsey went on to relaunch and edit She. "I really knew what I wanted to say with that magazine, and succeeded." Sales shot up by 40 per cent. Now 50, she is the mother of 14-year Thomas and is married to Christian. She works as a freelance journalist and is writing a novel. And there's her Cosmo book. "I'm so glad to have been a Cosmo girl," she says. "Both in my life and my work."

'Was It Good for You, Too?' is published on Thursday by Robson Books at £16.95