While much has been written about the work of late twentieth-century Spanish women writers, the significant contribution of nonfiction writing by women to the shaping of cultural identity during the Spanish Transition, defined here as 1975–1982, has received much less attention. This study argues that through their work in general interest periodicals, women writers added an underrepresented point of view to a public discourse focused on political and cultural change while also helping to establish a feminist counterpublic discourse that claimed intellectual space for women in the public sphere. Organized thematically, the three chapters focus on the various contributions of the nonfiction work, and two fiction pieces, of Rosa Montero, Montserrat Roig, Maruja Torres, and Carme Riera. Chapter one examines the theme of cultural identity and considers the interview collections of Montero and Roig as evidence of their work toward establishing an idea of collective identity by presenting cultural portraits of Spain and Catalonia, respectively, through interviews with well-known and carefully selected personalities. I argue that these collections constitute cultural artifacts and as such add to the discourse during the Transition around questions of collective cultural identity. In chapter two I explore the emergence of women in the public sphere and I contend that the essays, chronicles, and autobiographical writing of Montero, Roig, Torres, and Riera contributed to the production of a democratic discourse as well as to the creation of a feminist counterpublic during the Transition years. The final chapter of my thesis focuses on Montero's and Roig's exploration of female subjectivity in several of their nonfiction articles as well as their representation of women as political subjects in their fiction. I assert that their work advances the idea of women as disenchanted subjects, mirroring the political and social disillusionment experienced generally after the approval of the 1978 Constitution (in October of that year), and begins to suggest a way out of the patriarchal labyrinth within which they had struggled throughout history.