Illustration · An imagined card table set for bridge, with a teapot, a cup and an ashtray, while a meeting goes on behind a closed door, as the families passed the time in the early years. Not drawn from a photograph.

Brooklyn to Long Beach · 1935–1950

Before the name

For fifteen years before Al-Anon, the families of AA members met in living rooms and back rooms, under many names, some of them with Steps of their own.

“I am not an alcoholic. I don’t even like to drink.”

The wife of an alcoholic, opening an article about the family groups · Coronet, July 1949

The other side of the door

Around 1939, AA members began holding a closed meeting once a week, for alcoholics only. A handful of their wives began meeting by themselves. “At first we either played bridge or gossiped,” Lois W. wrote.

Soon they were talking about their own problems instead, and finding that none of them had to face those alone. By June 1940, as Lois remembered it, they were meeting at AA’s first clubhouse in New York while the alcoholics held their closed meeting.

The families had been there from the start, in the mid-1930s. In Brooklyn the alcoholics gathered at Lois’s house, and their wives, children, parents and friends counted themselves part of the group. Whenever anybody had a car, they piled in and drove to a meeting in New Jersey, Philadelphia or Akron, often all night.

Illustration · The drives Lois W. remembered, from her house in Brooklyn to meetings in New Jersey, Philadelphia and Akron. Placed by latitude and longitude, roughly to scale, with the state lines dotted; the routes are not particular roads.

They came to help the drinker, not themselves. Most of them felt, Lois said, that what they had been through at the alcoholics’ hands “set us above them spiritually.” Then, by degrees, they watched their mates grow and saw themselves falling behind.

MoreLois and the shoe

Lois said the families tried to live by the program too, “but often only in a superficial way” at first. She had begun to see it was meant for her as well in the mid-1930s, the Sunday she threw a shoe at Bill W. Captain of My Soul tells that story.

In 1941 a Saturday Evening Post article brought thousands of newcomers into AA, and their families found groups beside AA in many cities. Some were what Lois called coffee-and-cake groups. The wives made the coffee, served the cake and hung the clubhouse curtains, and “any spiritual growth was just a side issue.”

In St. Paul, Minnesota, in the 1940s, one wife went with her husband when he called on drinkers. Her job was to talk with the drinker’s wife and keep her out of the way while he talked to the alcoholic. It seemed to help, she said.

Not every group was a place to bring your own troubles. In 1950, a member from Chicago remembered, the groups she knew met in houses, by invitation only. If your husband drank again, there was nothing more they could do for you, and you politely left.

“Whenever my husband had a slip, I quickly learned not to tell the ladies…”

A member from Chicago, remembering 1950 · Many Voices, One Journey

The groups went by many names: AA auxiliaries, Triple A, Non-Alcoholics Anonymous. Some rewrote AA’s Steps for themselves (Step One, five ways, below). The first group AA’s office registered, in Long Beach, California, on March 1, 1945, called its version the “Non-Alcoholic Steps.”

MoreBorrowed words

Long Beach’s leaflet borrowed passages from the Big Book’s chapter for wives (By the Carload) without saying so.

In Regina, Saskatchewan, from 1949, the groups were N.A.A., for Non-Alcoholics Anonymous. Go deeper, below, follows one family there.

In July 1949 Coronet, a magazine with two million readers, printed a member’s account of the family groups. Its first lines are the ones that open this page.

Illustration · Knitting on a cloth: what one AA member expected the family groups to be. Not drawn from a photograph.

A year later an AA member who had taken the family groups for knitting circles was lured into one of their meetings. He expected to hear complaints about the drinking husbands, and heard none. The wives, he wrote in the AA Grapevine, were “examining themselves—not us!”

They still had no office of their own. That year Bill W. came home from a tour of the groups and told Lois the families needed one. Captain of My Soul tells what she did next.

MoreFive dollars, sent back

Until then, AA’s office and its Grapevine passed along the family groups’ addresses. In 1950 AA’s office sent back $5 a family group member had sent it, since it now took money only from AA groups.

Listen Before the name About 1 minute

Side by side

Step One, five ways

AA’s First Step, and three of the ways it was rewritten for the families before the groups agreed, in 1951, to use AA’s own words. The main changes from AA’s wording are marked.

From Many Voices, One Journey, Al-Anon’s history of itself (2011), which prints the family groups’ versions, and the Big Book (1939). The second group’s version isn’t dated; the history prints it beside Long Beach’s. Quotations are short excerpts.

1939
The alcoholics

“We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.”

AA’s First Step, in the Big Book’s chapter “How It Works.”
1945
Long Beach, California

“I admitted that I was powerless over the problem of alcoholism and that our lives had become unmanageable…”

The first family group AA’s office registered. Its Eighth Step promised to be on the alert for “any destructive habits.”
About 1945
Another family group

“I admitted I was powerless over an alcoholic and that our lives had become unmanageable.”

It added a note: “Hadn’t I used pleas, reproaches, love, hate, threats and reasoning…?” Its Eighth Step named the habits: “nagging and criticizing.”
1950
Lois W.

“We admitted that we were powerless over the problem of alcoholism in our homes and that our lives had become unmanageable.”

In a letter to Australia that January, describing the Steps the groups used. She had written a version for some early groups herself, she said later.
1951
The groups, by letter

“We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.”

Asked by letter, the groups chose AA’s Steps as AA used them. “You overwhelmingly thought the A.A. Twelve Steps had more spiritual power…,” the office told them in March 1952. Its first pamphlet changed one word, in the Twelfth: “others” for “alcoholics.”

The less change, the better

Looking back in 1962, Lois W. said she had written her version thinking, “rather superficially,” that wording suited to the families would be best. Watching the Steps change family after family had taught the old-timers there was strength in the very wording: “the less change, the better for us of Al-Anon.”

For a closer look

Go deeper

Two magazine stories about the family groups, what one Chicago group read, and one family in Saskatchewan.

Two magazine stories

The family groups first drew national attention, as Al-Anon’s history tells it, in Coronet’s July 1949 article “New Help for Alcoholics.” Its writer, a member, described a meeting where people handed the chairman written questions and the group worked out answers. Can a wife or husband talk an alcoholic out of drinking? “No!” Nagging, or even a reasonable argument, would accomplish nothing until he decided for himself. She put her name on the article; there was no fellowship-wide policy on anonymity yet.

A year later, in the AA Grapevine of July 1950, an AA member wrote about a meeting run by a panel of wives from Toronto: this was “no sewing bee but a spiritual force at work.” Al-Anon’s history sets the two side by side: one meeting was mostly about handling the drinker, the other about the members themselves.

What they read

Before the family groups had literature of their own, the Chicago member remembered, hers read the Big Book, a small pamphlet, Norman Vincent Peale, and magazine articles on how to be a good wife, “still thinking we caused the drinking!”

At the clubs the women cooked dinners and turned the money over to the AA club. They learned the Steps and slogans their husbands used, but never applied them to themselves. Today, she wrote, anyone can get help, whether the drinker is drinking or not.

N.A.A. in Regina

A member from Saskatchewan remembered how it reached the family. In 1947 the father’s cousin, sober in AA in Toronto, came west with his wife to tell him there was a way out, and left him a Big Book. The mother read it to him. They took the train to meetings in Regina, where the mother was allowed in because she could read, and some of the men were too shaky to.

In 1949 the mother and her sister got in touch with a family group in Winnipeg and helped start one in Regina. The groups were called N.A.A., Non-Alcoholics Anonymous. When the two older daughters moved out, the parents turned a bedroom into the AA literature depot for Saskatchewan, and the member, then a teenager, was teased about having to sleep with the literature after drinking too much.

In 1963 and 1964 the mother was Saskatchewan’s first delegate to Al-Anon’s World Service Conference (part 3). The father wouldn’t let her go a third year. AA’s delegates, he said, served only two.

Sources

Many Voices, One Journey. Al-Anon Family Group Headquarters, 2011. Chapter 1, “Alcoholism and isolation, 1925–1950” (the families at the first meetings, the wives’ own meetings, the Long Beach group and the groups’ Steps, the Coronet and Grapevine articles, the memories from Chicago, St. Paul and Saskatchewan, Lois W.’s letter of January 1950 and her comment of 1962, the returned $5); chapter 2 (the groups’ choice of AA’s Steps, from the office’s newsletter of March 1, 1952).
Alcoholics Anonymous (the Big Book), first edition. Works Publishing, 1939. Chapter 5, “How It Works” (Step One); chapter 8, “To Wives.”
“New Help for Alcoholics,” Coronet, July 1949, and “The Non-Alcoholics—God Bless ’Em!,” AA Grapevine, July 1950, both as quoted in Many Voices, One Journey, chapter 1.
Al-Anon Family Group Headquarters, Al-Anon Faces Alcoholism (magazine), 2026 edition: “How Serious Does the Drinker’s Problem Have to Be for Al-Anon to Help?”
Al-Anon Family Groups, “The Twelve Steps” (al-anon.org).