The single episode of Fatimah's life with the largest later consequence is the dispute over Fadak. Fadak was a productive estate near Medina which, in the accounts, the Prophet had granted to his daughter or which she claimed to inherit from him after his death.
The first caliph, Abu Bakr, declined the claim, citing a tradition he reported from the Prophet that prophets leave no property to be inherited, their estate passing instead to charity for the community. Fatimah, in the Shia account and in much of the wider tradition, contested this and was aggrieved, and she is said to have died estranged from the caliph over the matter.
The episode is read very differently across the branches of Islam. In Sunni tradition it is a legal disagreement between two revered figures, resolved by a prophetic ruling. In Shia tradition it is emblematic of the wrong done to the family of the Prophet after his death, bound up with the larger question of the succession that passed over her husband Ali; the estate of Fadak became a standing symbol of that grievance, granted and confiscated by later rulers in turn as a barometer of their stance toward the Prophet's house. What is a property dispute in one reading is, in the other, the first act of a foundational injustice.