The Great Lawsuit

Fuller uses Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom and war strategy, to symbolize the masculine traits women possess. Women, Fuller says, can have qualities American society considers masculine without becoming masculine themselves. Likewise, men can have qualities society considers feminine without becoming feminine, for “[m]an partakes of the feminine in the Apollo, woman of the Masculine as Minerva” (para. 174). Few people dispute that Apollo was manly and Minerva womanly; thus, few people should dispute that a woman with some masculine qualities is still a woman, or that a man with some feminine qualities is still a man. This is one reason Fuller finds it frustrating that women with strong intellects are often dubbed “manly.”

The Madonna, or the Virgin Mary, is often praised for her virtue, purity, and chastity, but Fuller thinks she is also an important example of the influence women have had on western society. She enabled Christ to be born and has remained a venerated figure in Catholicism for centuries. Fuller thinks people have distorted the role virginity plays in the Madonna’s story. It is meant to show that God works through humans, but American society has twisted it into an example of how women’s worth depends on their relationship with men. Virtue and value are determined by the activities they do with men—or the activities they avoid. Fuller thinks a woman’s value is determined by God and her relationship with the divine.

Fuller believes that poets and artists can see the truth more clearly than many other types of people. This quality is valuable not only to their spiritual journeys but those of others. While other types of people tend to get distracted by less noble things such as habits, artists and poets are able to see what matters and focus on it: “For the truths, which visit the minds of careless men only in fitful gleams, shine with radiant clearness into those of the poet, the priest, and the artist” (Paragraph 71). Because poets and artists are more apt to see the truth, they are more likely to view women for what they are: noble and destined for the divine. Fuller also argues that artists and literary men often have marriages of intellectual companionship that are more fulfilling and respectful to women than other, less desirable forms, such as mutual dependence and mutual idolatry. Again, this is presumably because they can see the truth: that women are inherently valuable and deserve to be treated as men’s equals.