ABSTRACT
As an undergraduate in the early 1980s I was asked to imagine that God was female. This might now appear a rather passé idea given contemporary feminist knowledge of the linguistic primacy of the masculine. Once nouns such as chairman and policeman were presented as the grammatically acceptable forms of gender neutrality. Today concerns over political correctness have taught us to hear the male in those ‘man’ suffixes. However, for a working class woman, who a few short months previously had been working as a secretary and who had managed to obtain a place at university through part-time study, the idea of God as female was tantalising. It was, as you might understand, a moment that Mezirow (1978) describes as perspective transformation. Knowledge that God might be female was not simply added to my already growing stock of feminist knowledge. It contributed to transforming the way I experienced the world.
