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Welcome
“To watch people recover, to see them help others, to watch loneliness vanish, to see a fellowship grow up about you, to have a host of friends—this is an experience you must not miss.”
—Bill W., Alcoholics Anonymous
Women have been central to Alcoholics Anonymous from its inception. Many women, not necessarily alcoholic, provided inspiration, direction and support as the foundation of AA was being established. Nevertheless, in the early years, alcoholic women who came to AA seeking help for themselves generally found a Fellowship of men. The stories that these women tell are profiles in courage, as they struggle, and ultimately succeed, in claiming their seats in AA and their sobriety.
Voices of Women in AA is a collection of 61 stories that were originally published in Grapevine. They are organized into chapters devoted to early AA, spirituality, sponsorship, life changes, relationships, family, careers and friendships. The book concludes with a chapter devoted to women’s meetings.
Chapter One features stories by or about non-alcoholic women who contributed to AA early in its history. Some of their names, such as Lois Wilson, Anne Smith and Henrietta Seiberling, will likely be familiar. Other readers may be encountering these names for the first time.
Chapter Two puts the reader into the shoes of some of the earliest alcoholic women who came to AA seeking help for themselves. They were pioneers. Their stories leave an important legacy of AA recovery. Some of these early struggles can seem like ancient history to us now, since women alcoholics quickly find their seats in the rooms of AA every day. The remaining chapters turn our attention to the challenges for AA women in facing “life on life’s terms” in sobriety, often involving the very concerns that once fueled their drinking. Here, sober women write about repairing family relationships, healing abuse from the past, building friendships with other sober women, exploring romance, having careers and dreams and pursuing them, and the value of women’s meetings.
In the Big Book, the chapter “A Vision for You” states: “Some day we hope that every alcoholic who journeys will find a fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous at his destination.” Indeed, Voices of Women in AA chronicles the journeys of alcoholic women who did find the AA Fellowship to have sober, meaningful lives.
CHAPTER ONE
Our Beloved Friends
Non-alcoholic women who helped AA early in its history
The history of Alcoholics Anonymous includes individuals, non-alcoholics, who made important contributions to the founding of our Fellowship. Some familiar names, such as Dr. Silkworth and columnist Jack Alexander, were men. There were also women. The stories in this chapter are by or about these women, who provided inspiration, direction and support at a time when it was needed.
This chapter opens with a story by someone who remains widely beloved in the Fellowship: Lois Wilson, the wife of our co-founder, Bill W. In the article “Family Circle,” Lois uses her own experience as the spouse of a recovering alcoholic to show how she applies AA’s Twelve Steps to her own life. There’s also a story about Anne Smith, the wife of Dr. Bob, our other co-founder. This Akron woman is another beloved figure in early AA; Anne may well have been the first person to understand “the miracle of what passed between Bill and Dr. Bob.”
The story “What We Were Like” is a profile of Akron resident Henrietta Seiberling. It was Henrietta who put Bill W. and Dr. Bob together—and the rest is history. In this story, Bill calls his gratitude to Henrietta “timeless.”
In “What a Doctor Learned From AA,” published in 1940, Dr. Ruth Fox describes how hearing an AA speaker for the first time turned her into an advocate for our program, well before there was any public recognition for the program
These women had faith that recovery from alcoholism might be possible at a time when nothing else seemed to work.
Family Circle
August 1953
Lois W., AA’s “first lady” as the non-alcoholic wife of Bill, the cofounder of Alcoholics Anonymous, tells the story of her own adventure in growth, applying AA principles to her own life.
–The Editors
We have often heard it said that the Twelve Steps of AA are a way of life for anyone, if you substitute for the word “alcohol” any particular problem of life. For a close relative of an AA, a wife or husband, even the word “alcohol” does not need to be changed in the First Step. Simply leave out “alcoholic” in the last, thus: “carry the message to others, etc.”
We wives and husbands of AA in our Family Group try to live by the Twelve Steps, and the following is how one wife applies the Twelve Steps to herself:
Step 1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.
I was just as powerless over my husband’s alcoholism as he. I tried in every way I knew to control his drinking. My own life was indeed unmanageable. I was forced into doing and being that which I did not want to do or be. And I tried to manage Bill’s life as well as my own. I wanted to get inside his brain and turn the screws in what I thought was the right direction. But I finally saw how mistaken I was. I, too, was powerless over alcohol.
Step 2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
My thinking was distorted, my nerves over-wrought. I held fears and attitudes that certainly were not sane. I finally realized that I had to be restored to sanity also and that only by having faith in God, in AA, in my husband and myself, could this come about.
Step 3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him.
Self-sufficiency and the habit of acting as mother, nurse, caretaker and breadwinner added to the fact of always being considered on the credit side of the ledger, with my husband on the debit side, caused me to have a smug feeling of rightness. At the same time, illogically, I felt a failure at my life’s job. All this made me blind for a long time to the fact that I needed to turn my will and my life over to the care of God. Smugness is the very worst sin of all, I do believe. No shaft of light can pierce the armour of self-righteousness.
Step 4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
Here is where, when I tried to be really honest, I received a tremendous shock. Many of the things that I thought I did unselfishly were, when I tracked them down, pure rationalizations—rationalizations to get my own way about something. This disclosure doubled