This article deals with the methodological problems involved in constructing a history of women's writing. It also presents an outline history of women's writing in Poland and a review of the state of research in that field. Although women's writing is an integral part of Polish literature, the author argues that its development is influenced by specific factors which determine the cultural and social condition of women in a given historical time. Consequently, the periodization of women's

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... ng should take into account criteria and divisions which do not always coincide with the customary reference points of the mainstream literary history. The author also compiles a list of some specific problems of the historiography of Polish women's writing which require more focused attention on the part of researchers, ie. the phenomenon of the second-rank female writer, subgenres of women's writing, and the work of female writers from the interwar period, who continued to write in the post-war Poland.