“The Dinner Table Was the Center of Social Life”: Home Demonstration Clubs and Women’s Emancipation in Tennessee and Kentucky, 1910s-1970s

This article explores the political, economic and social dimensions of home demonstration workshops and homemakers’ clubs in two U.S. Southern states, Tennessee and Kentucky, at the beginning of the 20th century. Held in the privacy of housewives’ homes, these workshops offered training in cooking, sewing and canning, allowing these women to acquire economic skills as well as social and political awareness. By relying on a supportive community and under the guidance of club directors and demonstration agents, these club members transcended their socio-economic status, notably entering economic markets. These workshops also enabled some of them to take on local and national political responsibilities and even to access influential positions. Based on oral interviews conducted in the early 1980s, this article offers a new vision of working- and middle-class Southern women: educated and active in the local communities, they were able to mix private and public spheres to impose themselves in a landscape often unfavorable to them.