Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić is one of the most prominent, if not the most prominent, author of Croatian children's literature. Despite the external influences of patriarchy, in the context of women's roles in the collection Tales from the Long Ago, an internal struggle with what has been learned and what is felt to be correct is visible. The wording of the fairy tale is already established and generally recognized as such that it marginalizes the female role and is objectified as such, and the paper discusses the sources and theories of such a way of formulating children's literature. In the paper, the mythological origin will be connected with the objectification and negative portrayal of women, and it will be mostly connected with Russian mythology, specifically with the Russian author Afansyev. It will be written about gender in general, but also in the context of gender roles that are represented in fairy tales. After a general presentation of women in fairy tales and an explanation of where the negative attitude towards women in history originates, each fairy tale from the collection Tales from the Long Ago will be treated precisely according to the gender roles it describes. The skeleton of the fairy tales will be presented in the context of the ambivalence of the female characters and the author's internal struggle with the imposed patriarchy.