Illustration · A convention stage after the hall has emptied: a lectern with a microphone and a glass of water, and an empty wheelchair beside it. Not drawn from a photograph.

Easton, Washington and New Orleans · 1970–1980 and after

Legacy

She stood up on her good leg to take an award, spoke at her sponsor’s memorial, cared for Priscilla as her memory failed, and weeks before she died told AA’s convention that its women were her children.

“You’re my children, and I’m so, so proud of you.”

Marty M., to the women of AA at its International Convention in New Orleans, July 1980 · quoted in A Biography of Mrs. Marty Mann, 2001

A great-great-great-great-grandmother

Early in 1970, on a tour for her second book, she stopped in Cleveland, caught her heel on the airplane steps, and broke her hip. If she’d been drunk, she said later, she wouldn’t have hurt herself: “I would have been too relaxed!” On April 1 her council was to give her its Gold Key, an award she had started, whose first winner, in 1959, was Bill W. Her doctors said the hip couldn’t bear her weight, so they strengthened the other leg. She was wheeled to the dais, and when the moment came, she stood up. Bill, already very ill and short of breath, was the first on his feet in the ovation, as one guest remembered it, and the last to sit down. He gave her the key, and she spoke for twenty minutes, standing on her good leg.

That July she filled in for Bill at AA’s convention in Miami Beach, giving talks he was too sick to give; it was his last convention. He died on January 24, 1971. At his memorial service in New York she said, “He was my inspiration, and not mine alone. He was one of the most gifted human beings who ever lived on this earth.”

She and Priscilla lived in Easton now. Marty gave a weekly talk to the patients at Silver Hill, a private treatment hospital nearby, and almost never missed her home group’s Friday night meeting. From the late 1960s Priscilla slowly lost her memory to Alzheimer’s disease, and Marty cared for her at home, with paid help, for the rest of her own life. Her own health was going too: emphysema, a bad back and hips, and in 1978 a fall and what seems to have been a small stroke.

On May 8, 1976, at a gala in Washington the council called Operation Understanding, fifty-two well-known people publicly identified themselves as recovered alcoholics, among them the astronaut Buzz Aldrin, the former senator Harold Hughes and the actor Dick Van Dyke. At the press conference that morning, when the host introduced her, the others rose and cheered her, and then, as one organizer remembered it, the reporters joined in.

In July 1980 AA held its forty-fifth anniversary convention in New Orleans, the city where she had eloped fifty-three years before. For the first time women alcoholics were featured, and she was a main speaker. She came in a wheelchair, walked slowly to the podium through a long ovation, and said, her voice breaking: “Talk about tears—I can’t tell you what it feels like to be a great-great-great-great-grandmother to so many women. Because that’s what you are, all of you.”

She came home elated. Two weeks later, at home in Easton, she was pouring hot water for a cup of tea late one evening when she had a massive stroke. She died the next night, July 22, 1980, at seventy-five. Priscilla died two years later.

Listen Legacy About 1 minute

The room she walked into

Women in AA

How many of AA’s members were women, from the months before she came in to its latest survey.

1939: Pass It On, on the Big Book’s title. 1955 and 1976: the forewords to the Big Book’s second and third editions (the 1976 figure from surveys of groups in the U.S. and Canada). 1998: AA’s membership survey, as her biographers give it. 2022: AA’s membership survey, of more than 6,000 members in the U.S. and Canada. Each bar is out of 100.

Early 1939Florence R., “at that time the only female member,” among the hundred or so the Big Book counted

1 in 100

1955“More than 15% of us are women.”

15+ in 100

1976More than a quarter, and nearly a third among newer members

25+ in 100

1998About one-third

33 in 100

2022AA’s latest membership survey

35 in 100

Half, she thought

In April 1939 she asked whether there were any AA women in the room, and there weren’t. In New Orleans in 1980 she told an AA meeting that the official figures for women were far too low. She believed half was closer to the truth.

For a closer look

Go deeper

Her sponsor, the council she left behind, and the papers she left to historians.

Bill and Marty

Bill W. was her sponsor from 1939, the man who came looking for her at her mailboxes that first Christmas. In AA both were attacked, at times, for being too public. She once said that “when you raise your head a little above the crowd, you’re an irresistible target.” Both lived with depression, and had learned, as she put it, that “the depression will end. It always does.”

In 1956 he told her council’s annual meeting that it had done more than any other single agency to make friends for AA and to teach the world how grave the illness was. With him, she decided that she couldn’t write the full story of her life, because she would have had to break her anonymity in the press.

Many in AA came to call her its “first lady.”

After her

In the mid-1970s the council opened its first Office on Women, with the slogan “Alcoholism is a women’s issue.” In 1979, in a fight over warning labels on alcoholic drinks, she was asked for her view and said only, “The goal of NCA is three things—Reduce stigma. Reduce stigma. Reduce stigma.” The committee took her to mean that labels were none of the council’s business, and the fight set off an upheaval in the council. Within a few years the alcohol industry had lost its seats on the board, and by 1982 the council was calling for higher taxes on alcohol, a national drinking age of twenty-one, limits on advertising, and warning labels.

Until she died she was a consultant to the director of the federal institute on alcoholism that the Hughes Act had set up. In 1990 her council became the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence.

By 2001, her biographers wrote, her name was scarcely known to the second and third generations in AA.

Her papers

Friends urged her to tell her own story. After Operation Understanding in 1976, the television host Garry Moore offered to pay for the recording and typing if she would write a book. She never took him up on it.

Instead, at Syracuse University’s request, she left her papers to its library, in the hope that someone would one day tell the council’s history. Among them were letters that made her private life plain, which she meant historians to see after her death.

Her biographers, Sally Brown and David R. Brown, drew on those papers, on fifty-one tapes of her talks, on Felicia G.’s journals, and on interviews with people who knew her, for their book of 2001, the main source for this piece.

Sources

Sally Brown and David R. Brown, A Biography of Mrs. Marty Mann. Hazelden, 2001. Chapters 12–14, 18, 22 and 26–30, the introduction, the epilogue and notes. Its unattributed quotes of her come from fifty-one tapes of her talks or from her writings. It quotes Edward L. Johnson’s written recollection of the Gold Key dinner, and an organizer’s account of Operation Understanding.
Pass It On. AA World Services, 1984. Chapter 11 (Florence R. and the title) and chapter 25 (the 1970 convention).
Alcoholics Anonymous (the Big Book), forewords to the second edition (1955) and third edition (1976); quoted from the fourth edition, 2001.
Alcoholics Anonymous, 2022 Membership Survey (pamphlet P-48). Women, 35.45 percent of members surveyed.
National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence, “A Timeline of Significant Events”, for the change of name in 1990.