Advice for the Wives.

Our group didn't study To The Wives or To The Employers by group conscience. Those are particularly antiquated., but it was different in 1935. Interestingly enough, for Lois, she never would have divorced Bill. I couldn't have gotten away from that quickly enough.

You're talking about the 1930s. Don't try to pretend that nearly 80 years have not passed since this hit the fan. Life for women in the United States was exactly this kind of awful up until feminism kicked in again. Consider this, from "Women Must Play The Game As Men Do", written in 1928 by Eleanor Roosevelt: "Beneath the veneer of courtesy and outward show of consideration universally accorded women, there is a widespread male hostility--age-old, perhaps--against sharing with them any actual control." And this "advice" given by a counselor at the American Institute of Family Relations, who told a woman whose husband had an affair after 27 years of marriage, in the 1950s): "We have found in our experience, that when a husband leaves his home, he may be seeking refuge from an unpleasant environment. Could it be that your husband feels that he is not understood or appreciated in his own home? What might there be in your relations to him that could make him feel that way? Could you have stressed your contribution to your marriage in such a manner as to have belittled the part he has played and thus made him uncomfortable in his presence?" The job of the Little Woman was not to live or educate herself or to be active in her community; it was to wait on her husband and make sure he didn't get injured by some slight or unkindness. This was the entire society-sanctioned focus for women over the decades, until feminism turned it all inside out: a woman's role was generally to make a happy marriage and "steer it away from divorce".

Of course we can all see how anachronistic and unaware these views are as represented in the Big Book. That is how society was in the 30s, 40s and 50s. It would have been interesting to see what the tone of the Big Book would have been had it been written ten years before, during the freewheeling flapper era and before the stock market crash. I doubt it would have been, or could have been, so stodgy. But as it was, Bill Wilson was a product of his times. And all we have with which to view him now is 20/20 hindsight.

Women have made tremendous strides, and we're now watching them being rescinded one by one, or being targeted for dismantling by members of the Republican party. Women are once again being pushed to the back of the bus. I find the suggestions above typical for their time, but their time is long past. If you want to be taken seriously, if you want to keep your hand on the wheel of your own life, register and VOTE.

Dig this!

"Divorcees Anonymous
Divorcees Anonymous (DA) was an organization that helped women avoid divorce, Celello writes. Interestingly enough, it was started by an attorney named Samuel M. Starr. Again, it was all about what the woman could do to save the marriage.

One woman sought help from the DA when she found out her husband was cheating. Apparently, according to Starr, the problem was that the woman looked decades older, wore dowdy clothes and had stringy hair. The women in the organization took her to the beauty salon and sewed her new clothes. They also worked with her daily on “her mind and her heart as well as her appearance.” When she was deemed improved, the DA set up a date with her and her husband. After that, the story goes that the husband stopped seeing his mistress and came home." (A Glimpse Into Marriage Advice from the 1950s - World of Psychology)

Burn these pages !!!

How else could he get away with the things he did?

"“Don't condemn your alcoholic husband no matter what he says or does” Big Book p.108, "To Wives"

“To Wives” is the biggest pile of sexist drivel I have ever read (and that’s saying something). There’s a caveat, these days, that it could apply equally if the sexes were reversed. Really? Would any self-respecting man really take this seriously if it was in reference to himself; if he was the long-suffering spouse and his wife was the alcoholic? She should be perfectly free to neglect him and their children and spend all her time going out doing ‘spiritual work’? He should put up with her just ‘coming and going as she likes’, leave him to look after the home and family, never get angry or complain and be all-understanding? He should put up with her sitting around all day drinking coffee and smoking – but that’s OK and he shouldn’t say anything because she’s ‘sober’? He should tiptoe around on egg-shells, terrified that if he shows any kind of natural human emotion she will drink again? He should look deep into himself and see that because his wife is an alcoholic he should recognize himself as being ‘afflicted with pride, self-pity, vanity, and all the things which go to make up the self-centered person’? Don’t think so. Only a man could have written that, and – amazingly! – it was a man who wrote it!

OK, this was written in the late 1930s and its attitudes are antiquated, but this goes for the rest of the ‘big book’ too. So why are people required to read this rubbish now? What has this – or anything else in the ‘big book’ for that matter – have to do with any individual stopping drinking?

I’m not sure about the US, but in the UK and much of Europe the 1920s and 1930s were an era in which women made huge social and political progress and were in some ways more ‘feminist’ than we are now. Some of this was down to necessity – the First World War killed off a whole generation of young men, and the option of getting married, having children and being financially supported by a husband was simply not there for many. It wasn’t really until the late 1940s and 1950s, in the aftermath of the Second World War, that women were thrown out of their jobs and there was a huge movement to get them back to the home as housewives, major consumers of household goods, and generally subservient to men again. (And it only took about another 10-15 years for the next generation to rebel against all that crap because they really didn’t want it.)

There is no excuse for Wilson for this particularly self-serving piece of writing. In many ways the US led the world in fighting for equal rights for women, and this had been going on for many decades by the time he wrote the ‘big book’. Also anyone who really believed, even in the 1930s, that only men could get addicted to alcohol and only men's needs in this area should be addressed must have been a complete imbecile.

Maybe this wouldn’t matter, but this is this chapter that provides the foundation for the nonsense that is still spouted today in Al-anon. How many of those people are aware that it was actually written by a man, and merely contained his own personal opinions about how a ‘good’ wife married to a philanderer like himself should behave?