In this paper we discuss a family of viscous Cahn-Hilliard equations with a non-smooth viscosity term. This system may be viewed as an approximation of a forward-backward parabolic equation. The resulting problem is highly nonlinear, coupling in the same equation two nonlinearities with the diffusion term. In particular, we prove existence of solutions for the related initial and boundary value problem. Under suitable assumptions, we also state uniqueness and continuous dependence on data.