Ever since the beginning of time, women have had to struggle to achieve their goals and aspirations. If one should consider Eve in the garden of paradise, she not only struggled with God, she has continued to struggle her fight with the man she was created for, Adam. Not only is this woman condemned for eating the fruit of the sacred tree, but she is also banished from the perfect garden and forced to reckon with the man who was banished along side of her. As Eve is the first woman to struggle with the forces of God and with manipulative men, she sets the stage for centuries of ill-fated women who must also face the challenging forces of the men they love and the God they worship. .
Men and women of all ages moved to the newly settled lands of America to gain personal and religious freedom from their struggles at home. Women, although lightly stressed in historical writings, become especially important in these personal and religious struggles. Women writers such as Margaret Fuller and Anne Bradstreet wrestled throughout their lifetimes with their struggles of sexual equality and the forgiveness of God. Through their writings, Fuller and Bradstreet expressed their opinions about equality of the sexes and religious tension in their prose and poems so that their readers would finally understand what women in a world full of men are actually reflecting upon. .
Margaret Fuller wanted to fulfill her writing aspirations and have her works read and reviewed equally of that of her male counterpoints. She knew that her prose was just as good, if not better than the male-dominated literary figures she had come to work with. In her identifying essay, "The Great Lawsuit,"" Fuller covers, in depth, her struggles with equality between men and women. She identifies that there are four different criterions that men and women should live up to which are as follows: household partnership, intellectual companionship, mutual idolatry, and religious marriage unions.