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Women Pioneers
From the special Grapevine publication AA Today--first published in June 1960 to celebrate AA's Twenty-Fifth Anniversary
When I attended my first AA meeting on April 11, 1939, I was the only woman alcoholic there. And I might not have been there had there not been one before me whose story I had read in the manuscript of a book called Alcoholics Anonymous. Some weeks before, my psychiatrist had handed me a red cardboard-covered document, saying flatly that he had about given up hope of being able to help me after nearly a year of intensive treatment in the sanitarium he headed. But, he added, he had just read something that might help, and he wanted me to read it. He said little more, except to remark that this group of men (the emphasis is mine) seemed to have discovered a way out of the same trouble I had--drinking.
I took the book in trembling hands and went back to my room with a wild surge of hope lifting me up the stairs three steps at a time. As I read, the hope swelled and sank again and again. My trouble had a name: alcoholism. It was music to my ears. Alcoholism was a disease. Shame, guilt, and self-condemnation rolled away like heavy fog, letting light and air into my heart again. I could breathe; I could bear to live. Alcoholism was "an 'allergy' of the body coupled with an obsession of the mind"; there was no known way of reversing the sensitivity of the body to alcohol, therefore an alcoholic could never safely drink again. This was the first reason I had ever heard that made sense to me. I could accept it. I could face a life without drinking, because I had to; there was no choice--my body wouldn't let me. It wasn't just a question of mental aberration after all; I wasn't insane, or hopelessly neurotic; I had a disease. And thousands of other people had it too. I wasn't the only one; I wasn't so peculiar, so different, so alone beyond the pale. I had a disease! My mind made a song of hope out of those words. Then came the letdown.
I was still alone
This handful of men had found an answer to the "obsession of the mind" that drove them to drink against their own will, against their own desire, against not only their better judgment but against their own good. That answer was God. My hope sank. This was not for me. I couldn't use this answer. I had lost God in my teens. I had outgrown this primitive notion. I was an intellectual, a worldly, widely travelled, well-educated, once successful woman. A woman. My hope completely disappeared. This was a man's book, entirely about men, obviously written by and for men, and a particular kind of men at that--religious men. Well, that was that. I'd have to find my own way out after all. I was still alone.
Until the day came: the day the crisis in my personal life did exactly what the book had said it would. It raised the bottom to where I precariously hung, and I fell right into God's hands. Gloriously, joyously, ecstatically surrendered to complete faith in a Power greater than myself. I was free. God supported me at a level I had never dreamed was possible, and there was no prison--neither of my own making, nor of the wood and stone that made the sanitarium, nor of gravity itself--that could contain me. I was free! The grass had never been so green, the sky so blue, people so nice and so good. The world was a divinely beautiful place. . . I was free. "Perhaps you are," the doctor said, "for I believe you have had an authentic spiritual experience. Hold on to it, and go back and read that book!"
'A Woman's Story'
I did, and it seemed a different book. True, it was still obviously by and for men, but it held truth for me and I gobbled it up. For the first time, I read it through to the end. And there I found, among the personal stories, one entitled "A Woman's Story." Thank you, my newly found God. I might have known you would supply everything I needed.
For a while it seemed the book held everything I needed. I was reluctant to meet the actual people. Would the reality of flesh and blood spoil my ecstatic dream? Was it a dream?
Weeks passed and the good doctor took matters into his own hands; he made a date for me to meet one of these men and his wife, and to go with them to a meeting in Brooklyn. I was warmly received; first names were the rule, they told me, and Mrs. M.--Sandy--made me feel more than welcome. We had dinner and set off for Brooklyn, to Bill and Lois's brownstone house. The first floor seemed crowded as we entered. I saw many women among the crowd, but no one looked as if they had ever had a drink. It looked like any friendly gathering in any home, with far too many strangers for my taste. I flew upstairs to leave my coat and lingered there. Lois came up and put her arm around my shoulder. "We want you down with us," she said. "You are very welcome." And she looked as if she meant it. I think I have never seen such sheer lovingness shining out of a person--it warmed and comforted me. Lois, a nonalcoholic wife, taught me about love. But that's another story.
Will it work?
I was made welcome, and yet--did I notice just a flicker of uncertainty? I was the youngest person there, by far. And I was a woman. I was fairly well dressed, was currently an inmate of a rather expensive private sanitarium (they didn't know I was stony broke, was there on a "scholarship" for free), and was obviously from a "good" background--well-brought-up, well-educated, and apparently meeting the specifications for that old-fashioned label "a lady." These things are not usually associated with drunken women, even in the minds of drunken men. This I knew from my own experience.
So I identified myself, and found myself telling the naked truth about my drinking as I had never been able to do even with my doctor. And I noted the small intake of breath, the widening of eyes, the retreating but still dormant suspicion in some of my questioners. But for enough of them I made the grade. I was accepted as an authentic alcoholic, and therefore a qualified participant in the meeting. This night was an occasion: the first printed and bound copy of the book Alcoholics Anonymous was on display, I knew I was in when I was asked to sign the copy, along with the rest. And I further knew I was in when I found myself talking almost exclusively to the men who were alcoholics. They so surrounded me, and asked so many questions, that I knew I was indeed a rarity--something of an occasion myself.
As soon as I decently could, I asked about the woman whose story was in the book. She was much older than I, with grown children. Her name was Florence. No one seemed to know her except Bill and Lois, for she was in Washington where one of the earliest members of the group, a man named Fitz, was trying to get something started. He was having a rough time, for all the prospects, including Florence, kept getting drunk. I breathed a prayer of thanks that she had stayed sober long enough to write her story--for me. Bill said that she and Fitz would be coming to New York soon, and I could meet her. There were hopes, Bill said, that the one other group, in Akron, might have a woman member soon--they were working on one. But here in New York I had to face the fact that I was, indeed, alone. Unique. I didn't like it. I had been feeling alone and unique for far too long. At least the men here were like me. Or were they?
I began to understand the faint uncertainty, the wariness, the disbelief. I began to wonder myself if this program would work for women. I could deal with their questions about my rights to the title of alcoholic--I had qualifications to match anyone's--but only time could deal with their unexpressed doubts as to the ability of a woman to live their program successfully. And only time did the job.
Carrying the message
The first year was the hardest. I had plenty of prospects but few results. All that long hot summer I went into New York once a week to the meeting, hoping a woman might appear, find me, know that she was not alone and unique, and stay. Florence came, and left, without any real contact being established between us--she did not seem to want to talk. I saw her only once again, sober, and then she died on a drunk.
I found it difficult to convince the older members that I wasn't a freak, the only one of my kind, and to convince the newer men that there was such a thing as a woman alcoholic and that I was one. The newer men often found it difficult to conceal their disgust at the idea, and more than once I heard, "If there's one thing I can't stand, it's to see a woman drunk!" They just couldn't believe that women couldn't help it any more than they could. Most of the men were wonderful, and fully accepted me as one of themselves, but there remained a curious loneliness, nonetheless.
Finally, in October, came Nona, whom I had met when I entered the sanitarium nearly two years before. She came in wholeheartedly, a quiet girl not wanting to be noticed, but she was there. In November I went with Bill and Lois to Akron and called on a woman (drunk in bed) for whom they had had hopes, but I was no more successful than the men had been. I went on to Chicago where Sylvia lived--Sylvia who in October had gone to Cleveland to find AA in the home of an early member, and who had returned to Chicago full of sobriety and zeal to help others. Now there were three of us the country over--but three is a crowd. Three can be neither alone nor unique, and we were all three too different to be the same kind of a freak!
Against the odds
We used to hold long discussions as to why it was so difficult to help women, why they couldn't stay sober, couldn't make this program work. Some of the men thought it was because women were more dishonest than men, less direct. But I thought I understood the reasons for this--and I still think they are the reasons that keep many women from success in AA.
We have a double standard in our society. Many things that are acceptable, or at least forgivable, in men are not in women. Although the high pedestal on which women used to be enthroned is slowly descending to a more realistic level (and most women are duly grateful for this entry into more comfortable realms), it is doing so only in fits and starts, like a balky elevator. There are still areas of behavior that are forbidden to "nice" women, and excessive drinking is one of these. Many men who are themselves alcoholic and because of this have committed every sin in the book, are inclined to look down their noses at women who have suffered the same mishaps, and for the same reason.
The double standard has created another hazard for the woman seeking help in AA. Men are not supposed to care too much about "what the neighbors say" or "what will Joe think of you," but women most definitely are. Girls are brought up to consider other people's opinions of them, first and foremost. When a woman starts drinking too much, and then uncontrolledly, this becomes a prime bugaboo that haunts her sober moments. Unfortunately, the name Alcoholics Anonymous is frequently all mixed up in her already mixed-up thoughts with the total unacceptability of alcoholism, alcoholics, and everything to do with both, to most of the people she knows and whose opinions of her she has been taught to value above all else. How can she fly in the face of all she holds most dear, and pin this taboo label on herself? Better to hide in the bowels of the earth, or the bottom of a bottle.
These, I think, are some of the valid reasons why the growth of the number of women in AA was painfully slow at first. Yet growth there has been, and a commensurate change in attitude both within and outside of AA. Women who have embraced AA have found the God-given courage to hold on to their sobriety and to build from it a good life, open to the most critical inspection; to accept new values that do not give weight to "what the neighbors think--or say"; and to rely on their own conscience in communion with their own God as they understand him, for judgment of their worth.
But it is a long, slow process. In the spring of 1944, five years after I came into AA, the several large AA groups in Pittsburgh asked me down to speak at a public meeting. They told me outright that they wanted to show Pittsburgh that there was such a thing as a woman alcoholic, and that she could recover. Still, it was many months after that before they got their first woman member. Groups have written me from all over the country to say that after four and five years of intense activity and growth, they had yet to have a woman member; I have made countless trips and many speeches to show myself and give evidence of the possibility. This was a major reason why I temporarily gave up my precious anonymity when I entered public work in this field. No one was ever happier to resume that protective cloak after two years of both veiled and crass remarks and looks. It takes great faith and plenty of sheer strength to be an avowed woman alcoholic. I am both humbled and proud of my sex as I see the growing numbers who dare--for the sake of all those others still undeclared, still suffering the tortures of the damned, alone.
Women pioneers
Things move. During the late 1940s I had many letters from lone woman members, seeking comfort, company, and advice on how to find and bring in others. Then in the 1950s I began to be asked to come and speak at luncheons and dinners of just AA women. I thought the corner had been turned, that no one could ever again imagine AA was "for men only." Imagine my shock and horror when in December 1959, twenty years and eight months after my solo landing in AA, a woman member in a great midwestern city I was visiting told me of several AA groups there who would not receive women as members--stated flatly that they did not want women in their groups. Several men with us corroborated her story, adding, before I could catch my breath, that it didn't matter so much in a big city like theirs where there were plenty of other groups a woman could go to, but what bothered them was the fact that this was true in many small cities and towns where there was only one group, so that in effect this meant denying AA to women alcoholics.
There obviously remains much to be done. After twenty years, women coming into AA are still pioneers. Those who make statistical studies claim that there is only one woman alcoholic for every five-and-a-half men. The records of public outpatient clinics seem to bear out this figure. But there are many physicians in private practice, where a confidence is considered as sacred as in the confessional, who state categorically the women alcoholics outnumber the men in their practice. Certainly in the big cities, one often finds the women outnumbering the men at closed meetings. Is it just that women alcoholics more readily find their way to the anonymity of the big cities? Or are there more of us than even we think?
Marty M.
New York, New York
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