Akron, Cleveland and New York · 1939–1948
AA called its newcomers pigeons, and for years a woman who came in had hardly any sober women to sponsor her.
“Why not? What difference does it make? They’re just as drunk as the men are.”
In Akron a newcomer was a “pigeon,” a word the old-timers thought Dr. Bob had coined. Women pigeons were rare, and Dr. Bob wasn’t sure the program would work for them. He always agreed to talk to the women who came his way. Then, as a rule, he “turned them over to Anne and other wives who were willing to work with them.”
Not many wives were. Most of them backed away from a woman who came in alone, Elgie R. remembered, and the men got leery of her. “Nobody wanted to handle it.” Elgie, the young wife of a member, was willing.
The idea took hold that men should help men and women help women. It came first, Elgie said, “as a means of A.A. self-preservation, before experience proved it wise for the newcomers’ sake.” The trouble was that there were hardly any sober women to do it. “So the wives continued to do the job.”
Cleveland was no easier. The first woman Warren C. remembered there was thrown out by the wives: “She was so bad, they wouldn’t allow her in their homes.” She got sober later, Clarence S. recalled, but she stayed away from AA.
It’s the spring of 1939, in Akron, Ohio. In AA a newcomer is called a pigeon, and Dr. Bob probably coined the word. But a woman pigeon worries him. He isn’t sure the program works for women.
A woman from Toledo has been sent to the group, and Dr. Bob asks Elgie R., a member’s young wife, to take her in. Most of the wives back away from a woman who comes in alone. Elgie doesn’t. Why not, she thinks? They’re just as drunk as the men are.
In Akron the idea grows that men should help men, and women help women. But there are hardly any sober women to do it, so the wives go on doing the job.
In New York, Marty M.’s sponsor is a man, Bill W. Before long she is sponsoring women herself. Even so, for years a woman in AA will have trouble finding a woman sponsor.
Six women, 1939–1948
Six women who came to AA while there were still few women in it, and who answered when they did.
From Akron and Cleveland members’ recollections in Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers (1980), and from Marty M.’s biography by Sally and David R. Brown (2001).
Akron · spring 1939
Her father and a lawyer got in touch with the Akron group. Dr. Bob asked Elgie R., married a year, to take her into her little house. When Ruth went home, a court wanted someone responsible in the house with her children, so Elgie went too, for a week.
A wife took her in
Elgie R.
New York · April 1939
There were almost no other women in AA near her. Bill W. became her sponsor, and later heard her Fifth Step. In her first year she tried to help at least a hundred women, and nearly always failed.
A man sponsored her
Women aren’t alcoholics, in People Like YouHer biographers, 2001
Akron · May 1941
She and her husband, Rollo, came in together, and John and Elgie R. made the call. A couple was easier. “Ethel and Rollo worked as a team, and that was safer,” Elgie said. “But every woman who came in alone was like a warning signal to all the wives.”
Later, sponsor to many women
Elgie R.; Emma K.
Cleveland · May 1941
She came in with her husband, Freddie, and was afraid of the wives: “there was no other woman I knew of in A.A.” Their idea, she felt, was “that if it helped Freddie, they would let me in.” Then, she said, “We started a woman’s group.”
A women’s group
Vi S.
New York · 1943
Bill W. sent her to the apartment Marty shared with Priscilla P., and Marty sponsored the two of them together. She “nurtured her pigeons, as they were called,” her biographers write, but she also practiced what Al-Anon would teach as “detachment with love.”
A woman sponsor
How Marty answered her calls from a bar, in People Like YouHer biographers, 2001
New York · 1948
She volunteered at Towns Hospital, and a woman sponsor was hard to find. For her second anniversary she asked Marty to speak, the only woman then, Ruth felt, who would say she was an alcoholic. Marty was “sort of on a different plane from most women in AA—like a goddess to the rest of us.”
Still hard to find
Ruth O., in Marty’s biography
So few women
Until there were sober women to do it, women who came to AA were sponsored by wives, by couples and by men. Then the first women to stay sober, Marty M. and Ethel M. among them, began sponsoring the women who came after them.
For a closer look
Where the word “pigeon” came from; two women sponsored together; and women sponsored by men.
The word “pigeon,” for a newcomer or a prospect, was probably coined by Dr. Bob himself, Akron’s old-timers thought. “He used that word,” said his son, Smitty. One member remembered him announcing at a meeting, “There’s a pigeon in Room so-and-so who needs some attention.” He might also call a patient “a cookie.”
Members kept after their pigeons by telephone. John S., who came in in January 1940, thought his friend Wade was nuts: Wade would call, ask how John was, ask after his pigeon, and hang up. “But he was just keeping in touch.”
The word traveled. Akron’s history calls Jack D., who carried the message to Youngstown in 1939, one of Bill W.’s “New York pigeons,” and Marty’s biographers call her Bill’s pigeon too.
Two newcomers with the same sponsor are what AA sometimes calls littermates. Marty’s were Felicia G. and Priscilla P., and they stayed friends for life.
In her first month Felicia couldn’t stop drinking, and Priscilla, “quite new in AA herself,” decided she was a stubborn case. Another woman in AA had just gone on a terrible bender. Priscilla told Felicia to take her to High Watch Farm, in Connecticut, and sober her up.
It was the dead of winter, and the farm had no central heating. The two of them slept in their ski clothes and fur coats. “I completely forgot myself,” Felicia wrote, “in trying vainly to help Anne, whose misery I understood.”
Marty’s biographers, writing in 2001, describe the custom of their own day: a sponsor is “nearly always someone of the same gender.” In Marty’s early years, they add, a woman often had no sober woman to turn to and had to choose a man. “Grandfatherly older men were frequently chosen or might volunteer themselves,” they write, since they were thought safe.
As time went on, Marty often sponsored men.
AA’s pamphlet today advises men to sponsor men and women to sponsor women, and then allows for an exception: “Some gay men and lesbians feel an opposite-sex sponsor is more appropriate for similar reasons.”