According to one scholarly postulation, the history of feminism in Poland can be divided into seven periods, beginning with the 19th century first-wave feminism. The first four early periods coincided with the foreign partitions of Poland, which resulted in the elimination of the sovereign Polish state for 123 years. However, if one defines "first wave feminism" as Betty Friedan and others have 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 this 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 was dominated by the "women's question", when elite women and a few men challenged the subordination