This doctoral thesis is a literary-sociological and literary-historical analysis of canonical status, cultural evaluation and self-perception of professional Croatian women writers from 1945 to 2005. This is the period of significant social and cultural changes, the period which can be divided in two parts. The first part covers the years after the WWII, the time of socialism, and the appearance of “women’s writing” and “golden age of feminism” during the 1980s. The second one is the post Croatian War of Independence period, the time of establishment of new social-political relations, as well as repatriarchalization of the society and the new wave of conservatism which had a huge significance on the position of women in society. The main aim of the thesis is to show if there is a continuity or discontinuity in ideological, social and ethical-aesthetic criteria in the second half of the 20th and the beginning of 21st century which helped, from the 19th century onwards, early women writers to become accepted in literary life of the nation, but at the same time kept them at the margins of national canon. The outsets are feminist literary criticism which cautions that literature is not autonomous, describes the social dependence of literary field and sees literary canon as the expression of partial interest and patriarchal point of view, as well as selective choice of ideas, literary practices, national, class and gender values. Along with feminist criticism (Jasenka Kodrnja, Lada Čale Feldman, Renata Jambrešić Kirin, Nataša Govedić), social theory of literature by P. Bourdieu is used, particularly Bourdieu's statament that “literary canon is formed in accordance with ideology, political interests and values of the elite class, that was white, male and European” and the concept of “literary-political junction” as described by Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer, which contextualizes literary facts and views them in respect of historical, cultural and socio-political life of the community. Based on these outsets ambivalent processes of the autonomization of cultural field and the trends of overvaluation of literary canon, after the two mentioned important historical changes in Croatian societ, have been researched. The thesis puts its focus on the position of female writers in the contemporary literature. Special attention has been paid to the position of professional women writers during the first years of socialist literary culture, as well as the appearance of “women’s writing” during the 1980’s. These two periods, although in many respects contradictory, incomplete and focused on events in the cultural field of “high art”, are compared with the period of (post)modernity after the Croatian War of Independence in which additional differentiation of literary field occurs splitting the literature into popular literature for women, women’s literature, chick lit literature, “media women’s writing”. Female writers represented in the thesis (Vesna Parun, Dubravka Ugrešić, Sunčana Škrinjarić and Sanja Pilić) were or still are professional female writers and significant representatives of different genres – poetry, novel, children’s literature. The author applied the feminist methodology which combines several research methods, but appropriated them for complex understanding of the subjects regarding their different characteristics, in this case gender. On one hand, we have researched the way that the selected female writers see their professional position, as well as their position in society in general, by means of analysing the interviews and autopoetic texts. On the other hand, we have come up with gender view within the culture field of “high art” based on the quantitative data (seeking information about women writers in literary histories, encyclopaedias and lexicons), then dana aboout literature awards and memberships in professional organisations. All these data have assisted in confirmation of the initial hypothesis.