Rukhmabai was married at eleven, as was common practice in nineteenth-century India, but was raised by a progressive stepfather who supported her continuing her education rather than moving in with her husband's family immediately, as most child brides of the era were expected to do once they came of age.
When she came of age, she refused to leave her stepfather's home to live with the husband she barely knew, a decision virtually unheard of at the time. Her husband sued her in British Indian court for 'restitution of conjugal rights,' a case that became a sensational and widely followed public controversy across India through the mid-1880s.
Rukhmabai wrote anonymous letters to newspapers defending a woman's right to refuse a marriage she had never consented to as an adult, drawing support from reformers and condemnation from conservative voices who saw her defiance as a threat to social order. The case eventually settled without forcing her back into the marriage.
She went on to travel to England to study medicine, returning to India in 1895 as one of the country's first practicing woman doctors, spending the following decades running hospitals for women and continuing to write and advocate against child marriage — using the medical career her legal fight had helped make possible.