Women in AA

In this excerpt from A Biography of Mrs. Marty Mann: The First Lady of Alcoholics Anonymous by Sally and David Brown, the authors provide a glimpse into early AA and what it was like for a woman trying to get sober.

It would be difficult to exaggerate Marty’s anxiety at walking into a meeting room of AA men. She had two strikes against her from the start, and she knew it. She was a woman, and she was an alcoholic. Very few women could overcome this double stigma. To overstate the consequences of that courageous act would be even more difficult. She changed the future development of AA forever by her example. No longer would it remain exclusively masculine in either its membership or its outlook. Beyond AA itself, Marty was an authentic witness to the outside world that a woman alcoholic was no more loose or fallen than a man, and that it was permissible for women to come out of hiding and seek help for their disease.

After the meeting, several of the men – and Marty – retired with Bill to a smaller sitting room upstairs to continue the conversation. The wives who stayed went elsewhere in the house with Lois. Marty had already read the Big Book three or four times and had memorized chunks of it. She was so excited that she couldn’t stop firing questions at Bill. The general topic, continued from the earlier meeting downstairs, was resentments.

“Resentments? I’ve never had a resentment,” Marty claimed. The men guffawed.

“I don’t know why you’re laughing,” Marty pouted. “What’s so funny?”

Bill challenged her, “What do you do when you feel unfairly treated?”

“Oh, I get hurt!” Marty said.

The men chorused, “That’s a resentment.”

Bill went on to point out that by withdrawing into herself whenever she felt hurt, she was in truth only hurting herself. Despite Marty’s years of psychiatric counseling, she began to learn at last the ancient Greek maxim “Know thyself.”

“I had my first lesson with Bill as a teacher that night. He was a great teacher.”

It was the beginning of Marty’s insight into how AA worked in people’s lives. Finally, at three o’clock in the morning, the meeting ended when Bill laughingly said, “Marty, you don’t have to get it all by Thursday.”

That entire evening was Marty’s introduction to the vital part of Alcoholics Anonymous that is its fellowship. Pragmatist that she was, she was instantly attracted to this pragmatic community that was likewise interested in what worked. She loved AA, saying, “I have never been bored in an AA meeting in my life.” The fellowship, the sense of shared tragedy and shared triumph, of being like shipwrecked survivors in a lifeboat, is a powerful bonding experience that provided AAs the strength and courage to stay clean and sober. Over time, however, Marty like most others who remain sober in AA, learned that the fellowship alone is not AA, nor are individuals, clubs, rooms, or meetings, important though they are. Instead, she discovered the deeper meaning of AA as “a [spiritual] way of thinking and a way of living” built around the Twelve Steps.

Marty also came to appreciate the preventive value of AA meetings. One time she noted that “alkies have a built-in forgetter of pain. Forgetting pain is necessary for survival, and may have been put there primarily for women, or no one would have a second child. But alkies need to remember how this capacity [to forget pain] can work against them. This is why alkies need to remain active and involved in AA.”

At the time, no one knew that AA had created the basic concept of group therapy. It was a concept that would later be adopted and adapted far and wide in the professional therapeutic setting.

That night, Marty stayed with Chris in New York. She fell into bed, exhausted by all the excitement, intending to sleep in late the next day. Grennie, unaware, phoned her first thing in the morning.

“How was it?” he asked eagerly.

Barely awake, Marty answered, “Grennie, there’s just one thing I can say. We are not alone any more.” At long last, Marty had “found her own people.” It was the start of her rejoining the human race.

From A Biography of Mrs. Marty Mann: The First Lady of Alcoholics Anonymous, by Sally and David Brown. © Sally Brown and David R. Brown, 2001. Hazelden Publishing, 2001.