Self-Seeking and the Treatment for Her Own Insanity – Marty M.

About This Speaker Tape

AA History Symposium - 2025

Marty M. traces the early days of women in AA beginning with her own stay in a Connecticut sanitarium where she fought the idea of her alcoholism until a crisis of anger and a specific line in the Big Book—'we cannot live with anger'—acted as a battering ram to her resistance. She describes the isolation of being one of the few women in a man's world fighting the stigma that women couldn't be alcoholics and her efforts to bring other women like Nona B. and Bobbie B. into the fold. The tape then shifts to Beverly M. who maps out a wreckage of blackouts painting her own furniture white in a delusion and a violent break with her mother. Beverly describes the grit of tending bars and the cycle of reformatories before finding a group in Queens that didn't blink at her history of 'hustling the streets' or knifing her mother eventually finding stability and a family of her own.

Topics

Timestamps

• 0:00 Introduction of Marty M. as one of the first women in AA.
• 4:15 Marty M. describes her time in a Connecticut sanitarium and her initial denial of alcoholism.
• 8:30 Marty M. reads the Big Book manuscript for the first time and struggles with the concept of a Higher Power.
• 11:45 Spiritual Awakening: Marty M. describes the 'battering ram' of the phrase 'we cannot live with anger' and her subsequent experience.
• 16:20 Marty M. describes her first meeting in a Brooklyn brownstone and meeting Lois W.
• 21:10 Marty M. discusses the difficulty of bringing women into AA and the stigma of 'woman alcoholics'.
• 28:40 Beverly M. begins her lead, describing her early marriage and the start of her drinking.
• 33:15 Laughter: Beverly M. tells the story of painting her own furniture white during a blackout.
• 38:50 Beverly M. describes the trauma of knifing her mother and her time in a straight jacket at Elmhurst General.
• 45:10 Beverly M. describes her time in Westfield State Farm Reformatory and her skepticism of AA women.
• 51:20 Beverly M. describes her first meeting with the St. Albans group and her raw honesty about her past.
• 56:40 Beverly M. discusses her recovery, her children, and her husband Billy I.