Weeks Jane Sutherland Women in the Military 1

After spending her formative years in Birmingham, Alabama, Jane Weeks joined the Navy during World War II at the age of twenty. Her service took her to New York City, California, and Hawaii. After the war she completed her college education at Birmingham Southern College on the G.I. Bill. She and her husband, Robert Weeks, relocated to Knoxville, Tennessee, where they both completed Master’s degrees at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. Jane Weeks then taught in the UT Department of Sociology for thirty years. In this interview, Weeks discusses her work through the Tennessee Valley Universal Unitarian Church to integrate Knoxville’s schools and hospitals in the 1950s. She also discusses her involvement with the Knoxville Urban Ministry, an interfaith, interracial group dedicated to community work. Through this organization Weeks met other women who formed a Monday Night Book Club, which she explains was a consciousness raising group in which the participants read and talked about feminist texts. Weeks also taught a free university course in Women’s Studies to UT-Knoxville students in the late 1960s. In 1974, Weeks was one of the founding members of the Knoxville Women’s Center. She spends the remainder of the interview discussing the Women’s Center’s work and her involvement with another Women’s organization, the Council of Appalachian Women.