Haimabati Sen

Haimabati Ghosh was born in the Khulna district, Bengal Presidency (now Bangladesh). Her father was a zamindar, a wealthy member of the Kulin Kayastha caste.[2] As a very young widow, she trained as a teacher in Benares. After her second marriage, she attended the Campbell Medical College in Calcutta,[3][4] and graduated at the top of her class in 1894.[5]

Sen was a physician at the Lady Dufferin Women's Hospital in Hooghly from 1894 to 1910,[3][6] and had a private practice in Chinsurah, until her death in the early 1930s.[5] She wrote a "valuable"[2] memoir in the 1920s, detailing her own struggles and her concerns for all young women: "Do I have to suffer all this simply because I am a woman? Would anyone have inflicted so much suffering on a man? Why are they so worried as to whose wife I am or whose daughter?"[2] Her memoir was translated from Bengali and published in English many years later, in 2000.[7]

Haimabati Ghosh married twice. She was first married at age 9, to a widower with two daughters; a year later, she was a child widow. Without the support of her husband, parents, brothers, or in-laws, she sought assistance at a widows' house in Benares, and joined the Brahmo Samaj community. In 1890, she married again, to Kunjabehari Sen. They had five children together. Haimabati Sen died in 1932 (or 1933),[8] in her sixties.[5]