Illustration · A typewriter with a page headed “To Wives,” a cup of coffee, and a pair of gloves on a stack of typed pages. Not drawn from a photograph.

Newark and Brooklyn · 1938

To Wives

Bill W. dictated nearly all of the book himself, including the chapter for wives, written in their voice.

“Bill wrote it, and I was mad.”

Lois W., on the chapter “To Wives” · Pass It On, 1984

17 William Street

Hank P. had an office at 17 William Street in Newark, New Jersey, the headquarters of Honor Dealers, his plan to organize gasoline dealers, which was failing fast. Besides a secretary named Ruth Hock, it had a big desk and some plush furniture. Each morning Bill W. rode over from Brooklyn, paced the office and dictated rough drafts while Ruth typed. He had no real outline, only a rough list of chapter headings.

Each chapter was read aloud at the New York group’s weekly meeting, in Bill and Lois’s parlor on Clinton Street, where it got “a real mauling.” Copies went to Dr. Bob in Akron, where they got nothing but support. Bill dictated them again, and Ruth retyped them, over and over.

Most of the text was Bill’s. Hank, the salesman, is credited with the chapter for employers. Dr. Silkworth’s letters went in at the front. And the chapter for the wives of alcoholics was written by one of the husbands. Bill introduced it as the wives of AA speaking to the wives of men who drink too much, and from there it speaks as “we”: “As wives of Alcoholics Anonymous, we would like you to feel that we understand…”

Lois W. had lived through all of Bill’s drinking. She offered to write the chapter herself. As she remembered it, he said no, because “it should be in the same style as the rest of the book.”

Decades later she still didn’t know why he had insisted. She was hurt, she said, more than angry.

Listen To Wives About 1 minute

The contents

Who wrote what

The book’s chapters in order, with who wrote each one as far as the histories say. No names appear on the book itself.

Bill W.’s account in Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age, 1957; Lois Remembers, 1979; Pass It On, 1984; and William Schaberg’s Writing the Big Book, 2019, as reported. See the Sources below.

—The Doctor’s OpinionDr. William D. SilkworthHis letters, at the front of the book. Told in The Little Doctor.
1Bill’s StoryBill W.Written first, in the spring of 1938, and used in the hunt for money.
2There Is a SolutionBill W.The second chapter Harper’s editor read.
3More About AlcoholismBill W.Dictated in Newark.
4We AgnosticsBill W.The last chapter before the Steps, in Bill’s telling.
5How It WorksBill W.The Steps, argued over word by word. Told in Keep Coming Back.
6Into ActionBill W.
7Working with OthersBill W.
8To WivesBill W., as the wivesBill first wanted Anne S. to write it. Lois offered.
9The Family AfterwardBill W.Lois had hoped to write this one too.
10To EmployersHank P.A former oil executive, writing from the boss’s side of the desk.
11A Vision for YouBill W.
—The storiesDr. Bob and the othersAkron’s written with help from a newspaperman, New York’s by the members themselves. Coming in 4 · Who were we to edit?

Whose voice

The chapter that speaks for the wives was written by one of the husbands. The wives began speaking for themselves in 1951, when Lois and Anne B. started the Al-Anon Family Groups.

For a closer look

Go deeper

Two accounts of the order the chapters were written in; Hank’s chapter; and the two women who might have written “To Wives.”

In what order?

In Bill’s telling, he wrote his own story and the second chapter in the spring of 1938, then two more, until he reached “the famous Chapter 5,” the Steps.

William Schaberg’s 2019 history, Writing the Big Book, tells it differently. After chapters 3 and 4, it says, Bill drafted “Working with Others,” “To Wives,” “The Family Afterward” and “A Vision for You,” and wrote the Steps chapter only after most of the rest was done.

Bill wrote his account nearly twenty years later. This page gives both.

The chapter for employers

Of the book’s eleven chapters, “To Employers” is the one credited to someone other than Bill. Arthur S.’s history credits Hank P., pointing to a hint in Pass It On, and Schaberg agrees.

It is written from the boss’s side of the desk: what an employer can do about a valuable man who drinks. Hank had been an executive at Standard Oil before his own drinking caught up with him.

Lois, and Anne

Before he wrote it himself, Bill had wanted someone else to. In June 1938 he wrote to Dr. Bob that “Anne should do the one portraying the wife.” Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers guesses that Anne S.’s modesty, her habit of staying in the background, kept her from it.

Lois told her side at least three times, in slightly different words. In her own memoir, Lois Remembers, published in 1979, she had expected Bill to ask her to write “To Wives,” and perhaps “The Family Afterward” as well. When she “shyly suggested” it, he said no: apart from the stories, the whole book should be in one style. “I have never known why,” she wrote. It hurt at first, but their lives were too full for her to dwell on it.

A year later Good Oldtimers gave her memory of his answer as “Oh, no. It should be in the same style as the book.” And in Pass It On, in 1984: “I wasn’t so much mad as hurt.”

Many readers still assume Lois wrote the chapter. AA’s own answer to the question is no.

By 1955, speaking to AA’s twentieth-anniversary convention in St. Louis, she spoke for the families in her own words: “We admit that we too are powerless over alcohol.”

Sources

Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age. Alcoholics Anonymous Publishing, 1957. “Service: The Third Legacy,” on the writing in Newark, and “Four o’Clock Sunday Afternoon,” for Lois W.’s talk at the 1955 convention.
Pass It On. AA World Services, 1984. Page 200, as quoted in AA’s answer “Who wrote the chapter ‘To Wives’? Was it Lois?”
Lois Remembers. Al-Anon Family Groups, 1979. Chapter 10, “The Big Book,” on Honor Dealers’ office and the chapters she had hoped to write.
Alcoholics Anonymous (the Big Book). Chapter 8, “To Wives.”
Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers. AA World Services, 1980. Chapter XI, on Bill’s June 1938 letter about Anne S. and Lois’s memory of the chapter.
Arthur S., “Big Book History and Myths”. For Hank P. and “To Employers.”
“Facts & Fables: William Schaberg Explores the Big Book’s True Origins”, The Fix. On Schaberg’s Writing the Big Book (2019).