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In one scholarly conception, the history of feminism in Poland[1] can be divided into seven periods, beginning with 19th-century first-wave feminism.[2] The first four early periods coincided with the foreign partitions of Poland, which resulted in an eclipse of a sovereign Poland for 123 years.[3]
However, if "first-wave feminism" is defined as Betty Friedan and others have done,[4] as a global movement in the 19th and 20th centuries, mainly concerned with women's right to vote (i.e., women's suffrage), then Poland experienced it at the same time as other Western countries, toward the end of the 19th, and especially at the beginning of the 20th, century.
The period prior to this had been dominated by the "woman question", when elite women and a few men challenged the subordination of women to men but did not necessarily advocate or collectively organize for equal political rights, nor for great societal changes.
In the Polish lands, the woman question developed alongside continental European debate from the 16th century onward.[5]