Jumping in rather late in life, but thought I’d put this out anyway:
Now (2015), you can use the pretty neat doc python library:
https://python-docx.readthedocs.org/en/latest/. And then:
from docx import Document
wordDoc = Document('<path to docx file>')
for table in wordDoc.tables:
for row in table.rows:
for cell in row.cells:
print cell.text