The aim of the article is presentation of writing activity of Polish women at the turn of the 19th and 20th century, which covered not only knowledge of various areas of life - “unscientific knowledge”, but also “scientific knowledge” comprising diverse, intensely advancing scientific disciplines. In the first part of the article, the author presents stages of education that is the preparation of women for popularizing activity, while in the second part she makes preliminary classification of popular science literature because of subject matter and genre forms. The author indicates thematic and genre groups, by specifying adequate work examples (titles), taken from 19th century bibliographic catalogues. She assimilated paraliterary works (didactic and moralizing novels, novels of manners, historical novels as well as fictionalized biographies of famous scholars) to genres popularizing scientific knowledge. Scientific monographs, lectures, readings, and novels make up a separate group. The author notes that genre patterns of popular science literature came to Poland from Western Europe and initially were in nature of translations and excerpts of texts with Polish commentary and paraphrases. Over time, original works speaking about Polish scientific discoveries and inventions began to arise.