"Pioneer, Persuader,
Inexhaustible Advocate, Marty Mann."
Included in the article is a tribute by my good friend, Susan B. Anthony. I
keep intending to write a "Big Meeting in the Sky" piece on Susan, but
haven't found the time yet.
The is the excerpt:
"Dr. Susan B. Anthony, author, lecturer, theologian, and counselor, is
another long-time friend and colleague of Marty's. The great niece and
namesake of the famous suffrage leader, she is currently lecturing on women
and alcoholism, and has authored seven books and many articles.
"Putting on paper my tributes to Marty helps alleviate the frustration I felt
when I could not get up north for her Memorial Services to share with old
friends of hers and mine.
What I did do when NCA called me to let me know of her death was to put my
emotion into prayer, for her and for us. Prayer was a gift that came some
years after sobering up in Marty's office on August 22, 1946.
I last spoke with Marty just a few weeks before her death, on July 3 when I
was visiting my sister. When I called her, she said in her rich, resonant
voice, "You just caught me. I am going out the door for the New Orleans AA
convention!"
She sounded buoyant and happy, her voice as young as the day I first met her
34 years ago. When I told her I had been one of the 500 nominated as public
members for the National Commission on Alcoholism and other Alcohol Related
Problems, she laughed "It's not 500, my dear, it's 700 or 800 nominees."
In July it seemed so natural that she was taking off for a talk. Just three
weeks before her death (even as my own great-aunt Susan B.) she was setting
forth for one last stint on the road. As her obituary in THE NEW YORK TIMES
said on July 24, Marty had averaged 200 lectures, all out of town, of course.
I was part of one of those flights, in 1977, en route to Des Moines, Iowa, to
keynote a conference commemorating the Council she and local friends had
started there. I had just spoken at another NCA conference celebrating her
birthday in Pennsylvania, flown home to Florida and was now flying to Des
Moines, getting off to be greeted by the program chairman when I saw Marty
ahead of me.
"Were you on that plane?" she asked. "I was in first class," she said
apologetically. "I sometimes splurge on that -- I get so tired."
She looked frail and I recalled the millions of miles she had journeyed for
alcoholism education, for alcoholics, miles that were marked by broken hips,
and illnesses. And et she felt she must apologize for the greater comfort of
first class, though she had passed three score years and ten!
When I couldn't get to her Memorial Service I wrote her family:
"My gratitude to Marty since sobering up in her office in 1946 surpasses even
my sympathy for you since we and the world know her work for alcoholics is
deathless."
I often wonder whether I would be alive and sober today if Marty had not
provided a quiet, private office uptown (at the old Academy of Medicine
Building, New York City) where a prima donna radio commentator, a woman at
that, could seek help n alcoholism. I was not ready at that point for the
old clubhouse downtown. Though Marty was not in the office that day of
August 22, 1947, her aura dominated the pleasant serene office, and her
volunteer AA secretary carried the message to me, as Marty later died by her
being as well as by her sharing.
Marty provided not only a place in which I could sober up that day, but
equally important and seldom mentioned today when even wives of ex-presidents
come out of the closet as alcoholics, Marty provided a witness. She was the
first and a continual sign, a witness, that an upper middle class lady can
also become a low class drunk, and then climb back up from that bottom to new
h heights.
I grew up thinking of my suffragist great aunt Susan B. as "The Mother of Us
All," the title Gertrude Stein gave to her opera about Aunt Susan. She was a
"mother" to us in the sense of her concern for our rights and our work.
Marty, I believe is "The mother of the woman alcoholic" not only the first to
stay sober in AA, but the first to carry the message to the outside,
non-alcoholic world, women and men, the message that alcoholism is a disease
and that it is treatable.
As Bill Wilson's (co-founder of AA) biographer, Robert Thomsen says: "Marty
was to become one of the pioneers in the field of alcoholism education, but
at this point she was primarily one of AA's spectacular recoveries." That
was when Marty, an "Attractive intelligent young woman with tremendous charm"
attended an early A meeting at Brooklyn. She instantly caught the message
and returned to Blythwood Sanitarium in Connecticut to spread the message
among other alcoholic patients of Dr. Harry Tiebout, one of the first medical
champions of AA.
Marty will go down in history as the founder and director in 1944 of the
first public health organization on alcoholism in history, the National
Council on Alcoholism. Her work finally lifted the nation's consciousness
about alcoholism so that the American Medical Association accepted that it is
a disease and that it is treatable. She went on to mold public opinion,
laying the ground work for the passage of the Hughes Act of 1970, the
Comprehensive Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism Prevention, treatment and
Rehabilitation Act under which the vast expansion of facilities for treatment
has taken place, providing networks of out-and inpatient clinics,
detoxification and rehabilitation programs.
A years before she died, Marty's 75th birthday was celebrated in advance by
our great friend and colleague, Felicia M. who put on a memorable party. It
was also her birthday, plus my 33r anniversary sober. Among the three we
totaled 104 years of sobriety!
I spent much of my time with Marty that night trying to persuade her to
dictate her own autobiography now that she was less on the road. She dodged
and demurred. I realized that she had reached that stage I have observed
over the years of interviewing some leading men and women. Self as subject
bored her. She had become increasingly "unsettled" in her later years. She
didn't want to spend the time that was left writing about herself, so that
task remains for someone else to do, someone who knew her, or even some
younger woman.
Marty is a model for the young women of today, not only the model of an
"unselfish" sober woman. She is what I hoped to be when I was young, a
liberated woman. She became a crusader, reformer, educator, organizer,
agitator, lobbyist, a truly great speaker, a lucid writer, a great 12th
stepper. She addressed U.S. Congressional committees and joint sessions of
state legislatures. She received honorary degrees. She was liberated not
only from the disease of alcoholism but liberated from restrictions upon her
as a woman back in the 1940s when I was broadcasting on New York radio
against those restrictions. Marty transcended the double stigma of being a
woman and an alcoholic.
In so doing she incurred snubs, distastes and dislike, and controversy. Even
her best friends, her A.A. buddies, were critical of her. When I worked for
NCA back in Boston in 1949, doing the first radio program that ever broadcast
interviews with live alcoholics, I sensed that hostility of local AA's toward
Marty's program of educating the public on the disease of alcoholism. NCA
was only five years old then, my sobriety was only three years old. #Even
these friends thought NCA was competitive with AA, that when Marty crusaded
for public education and prevention she somehow was detracting from AA. She
didn't need enemies among her own, but in those early days she had them.
Happily she outlived those misunderstandings. When the history of alcoholism
is written, this century will carry three names ahead of the others, Bill
Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith, co-founders of A.A. and Marty Mann, pioneer woman
AA member and pioneer alcoholism educator.
Marty lived to see her concern for women alcoholics begin to show results in
1976 when Jan du Plain launched NCA's office on women. In rapid succession
occurred the first national Congress of Task Forces on women and alcoholism,
then came a gathering of the alcohol establishment hosted by NCA and the U.S.
Senate subcommittee eon Alcoholism and Drug Abuse, a reception in the Senate
Caucus room honoring my 30th anniversary sober. Growing out of this the next
month, September 1978, the first ever Congressional hearing on Women and
alcoholism was held.
At lunch a few weeks later, Marty rejoiced at all this headway and said, "Do
you realize, Susan, that a the age of sixty you have begun an entirely new
career?"
I asked what she meant. She said the lecture tour that was launched by
massive coverage of the Senate activities. It would in the next four years
carry me 35,000 miles in 75 cities, 46 states and to Africa and Alaska
speaking on women and alcoholism.
Some of those talks were before the great main line women's organizations,
ranging from the National Federation of Business and Professional Women to
the junior League. Marty herself had dreamed when first forming NCA that
these women's groups would grasp the importance of educating on the disease
concept of alcoholism, especially for girls and women. But in the 1940s they
were uninterested. Perhaps had they begun their efforts then, they might
have helped avert the epidemic of alcoholism among girls and women in the
1980s, what I call the "age of anesthesia" that blankets us.
With their women's focus they might have seen as we do today that alcoholism
among women is different and distinct, and requires differences in prevention
and treatment. Women have problems that men do not have such as stigma,
discrimination, child care problems that bar women from residential
treatment, and Feal Alcohol Syndrome.
In November 1979, I added another career, private practice in alcoholism
counseling here in South Florida. Marty wrote me in her own hand her
encouragement and recommendation for my certification. It is a letter I
shall literally have framed. She wrote:
"Susan dear --
"Your activities exhaust me, just reading about them! and yet they too --like
Jan's -- are a replica of my own pattern, so I understand and applaud you --
"Alcoholism needs people like us: 'dedicated idiots' Selden Bacon
once call Yev (Gardner) and me and we lifted it as our banner and proclaimed
it good, which wasn't what he had meant!
"Anyway - again you are in the pattern by turning to counseling, which is
what I do, plus a once weekly lecture at Silver Hill and Yev also, at
Freeport Hospital. So we've all come full circle, back to AA's one-one-one.
It's good and I love it. So will you."
I pray I will continue to be a "dedicated idiot" and as she said "a replica"
of her pattern, carrying the message as she did, until the day I die.
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