Free Sex and the Single Girl: The Unmarried Woman's Guide to Men by Helen Gurley Brown

luck came from traveling alone. It takes guts, though. Undoubtedly it can sometimes be risky. But it seems to work in Europe. People are charmed by a lone attractive girl and are inclined to take her to their bosom. Two or more girls, they figure, have each other and need no mothering.
    According to Carol, all smart girls go to Florence … or any other Italian city. When an American girl steps out her hotel door, she is set upon by those gentle Florentine wolves. They are not ravening so much as they are genuinely crazy about American girls. Many of them are dreadfully poor. Men who look like sculptures are selling souvenir catalogues o utside the galleries … or else selling that stuff they pour over ice that tastes like Lavoris would if you drank it. But they are charming and courtly and you can store up enough flirtatious looks and florid compliments to last into your dotage.
    I don’t have the exact odds for meeting men in all vacation lands. Friends tell me they have had fabulous luck in Honolulu and Mexico City (traveling alone or with friends), also Nassau and the Canadian Rockies.
    Others say they never met a man.
    The situation probably changes hourly.
    In the United States it’s best to take a playmate unless you’re stopping with friends who can entertain you. You can check into Dallas, Miami or Palm Springs in your prettiest gown, and those cities, like all the others, have a way of not even looking up.
    Planned vacation tours exclusively for bachelor girls and men sound intriguing. I don’t know anyone who’s been on one yet. Maybe they all got married and never came back!
    Traveling on Business
    This is terrific fun. Someone else pays. You usually travel first class. You have a mission in the city even if a man never casts his shadow on your Val-a-Pak. It’s the old cry. Girls with something to do and places to go are better game than placid creatures who are kind of underfoot with their “Here I am, would you like to do something about me?” attitude.
    Carol, alone in Europe, for example, used business as an excuse to meet and talk to people not otherwise approachable. Her business was the next thing to monkey business, of course. She made it up! In Paris, for example, she visited a reducing salon, also famous for bust development, and chatted with the hep manager about exporting the same techniques to the States. In Rome, she called on the American Consulate to ask if there were any Italian knitwear companies who wanted representation in the United States. (She knew how well the Marchesa di Grésy and others had done.)
    You may think Carol sounds like a kook. Or one of those shot-out-of-a-cannon aggressive types. Actually she is a sensitive scaredy-cat but she does have a nimble brain and quiet, personal guts. In contacting Europeans on business she did nothing show-offy or that could really backfire. She just wanted to fill her trip with all kinds of people. Once home, she realized she was in no position to import bust development or Italian sweaters. She was much too busy managing the office of a C.P.A.
    Louise, on legitimate business as a traveling fashion consultant for a bra and girdle company, spotted an elegant, steely man on the train down from New York. He was seated across the aisle with a beautiful older woman, slathered in mink from chin to hem (not the wet-rat kind but opulent, pulsating mink).
    Louise listened to their conversation (finding it a damn sight better than her thoughts) while pretending to sleep. During the miles of eavesdropping she gleaned that the man was an attorney, probably single, as he never talked about his wife, and that he was a family friend of the woman’s—she had five children. They had met on the train accidentally and she called him Marcus. As Louise feigned sleep, she even heard them talking about her. They thought she looked tired and seemed rather young and alone, and surmised she might be traveling on business. Louise, feeling a bit warped and woofed