When people talk about the history of addiction recovery, the same names usually rise to the surface. The founders. The physicians. The policymakers. The experts who became the public face of the movement.

But the more time I spend in this field, the more I learn that the history of recovery is incomplete.

Women did not just support the recovery movement. In many ways, they carried it.

Long before advocacy became strategic, before trauma-informed care and family systems entered our field’s vocabulary, women were already doing the work. They opened doors for people no one else would help. They built community where shame had kept women silent and alone. They fought for dignity in systems that treated addiction as a moral failure, and judged women more harshly than men.

Women like Marty Mann started changing the trajectory of addiction recovery in North America in the 1940s. At a time when alcoholism was hidden in silence and stigma, Marty spoke publicly and unapologetically about addiction being an illness. That sounds obvious now, but at the time it was radical. She forced people to confront the idea that addiction was not just destroying individuals, it was impacting families, communities, and society as a whole.

That shift still impacts us today, whether people realize it or not.

Mae Abraham understood something else that the field often overlooked: people heal differently when they are treated with dignity. Especially women. Especially mothers. Especially those carrying trauma and shame that society often placed squarely on their shoulders. Mae co-founded what became Ashley Addiction Treatment in the 1970s.

Geraldine Delaney was known for her brutal honesty and long-term approach to treating addiction. She helped build environments rooted in accountability, structure, and humanity at a time when treatment was still evolving and became a strong believer in treating the family as a system. Geraldine developed one of the first in-house residential family programs at Alinda Lodge and ran the Lodge for four decades, stepping down as Executive Director in 1993.

First Lady Betty Ford’s transparency about her own substance use changed the public conversation around addiction and mental health dramatically. Her willingness to speak openly about recovery gave countless women permission to ask for help without feeling like they had failed.

The women above all had two things in common – they were all in addiction recovery themselves, and they all had to navigate systems that were not designed with them in mind.

Today, there are over 800 women-only treatment and recovery support programs, with Friendly House in Los Angeles being the first and oldest residential program in the country specifically for women recovering from substance use issues (it was opened in 1951 by Bea Jorgensen).

What appears most striking as we reflect backwards is that women in recovery were doing systems work before we even had language for it. They understood family dynamics before family systems became clinical terminology. They understood trauma before it became a conference topic. They understood the importance of community before recovery capital became a framework.

And yet, somehow, many of these women still end up treated like supporting characters in the history of recovery instead of architects of it.

Even now, women lead some of the most meaningful work in behavioral health while being underestimated in leadership, policy, and decision-making spaces. We are expected to be compassionate and relational, but rarely recognized as strategic or influential. Meanwhile, the systems that actually hold recovery communities together continue to be built and maintained by women.

Recently, I had the opportunity to participate alongside Dawn Nickel and Tian Dayton in a virtual session called Recovery, Identity & Community: Building a Women’s Movement in Recovery. Even after all this time, many women are still navigating recovery while carrying stigma, trauma, caregiving responsibilities, professional pressures, and expectations around who they are supposed to be. The conversation reminded me that recovery is never just clinical. It is deeply connected to identity, belonging, safety, and community.

Our conversation also reminded me that history generally unearths the stories of white, middle-class women first. And while incorporating women into the history of the recovery movement is important, it won’t be complete until we’ve uncovered the stories of the women of color who were also instrumental. Women like Stacia Murphy, who was President of the NCADD from 1999 to 2006. Leading the very organization that Marty Mann had founded, Murphy embodied the living continuity of this intellectual legacy, ensuring its reach extended to communities that had for too long been left at the margins. 

There are more women of color yet to be brought into the story. This important excavation work will and must continue.

What has become clear is that women in recovery are no longer waiting to simply be included in conversations about systems and policy. They are helping lead them. They are shaping treatment organizations, advocacy movements, peer communities, research initiatives, and public conversations about what recovery should actually look like moving forward.

And honestly, that shift feels important.

For a long time, women in this field were expected to hold everything together quietly. Now they are speaking openly, not just about recovery itself, but about ethics, leadership, trauma, family impact, and access to care. These are no longer side conversations. They are the future of recovery. Because that future cannot only be about expanding access to care. It must also recognize who has been shaping this movement all along.

Some of the most important recovery work never happened in front of cameras or behind podiums. It happened in quiet moments: in community rooms, around kitchen tables, in alumni groups, in treatment centers, in conversations with families trying to survive something they did not fully understand.

Women have been at the center of those moments for decades. Not because they were given power easily, but because they kept showing up anyway.

As our field continues to evolve, I think we owe these women more than appreciation. We owe them accurate history. We owe them recognition. And we owe the next generation a better understanding of who truly helped build the recovery movement into what it is today.

Because the truth is, women were never on the sidelines of recovery. They were helping lead it the entire time.