In 1883, Kadambini Ganguly and her classmate Chandramukhi Basu became the first women in India to earn university degrees. Kadambini wasn’t done. She wanted to be a doctor, in a country where most people believed a woman had no business studying medicine at all.

She won a place at Calcutta Medical College anyway. Some of her professors made no secret that they wanted her to fail. She qualified anyway, and became one of the first Indian women to practise modern medicine.

Then the whispers began. A Bengali magazine suggested that a woman who worked as a doctor must be a woman of loose character. Her husband took the editor to court, and the editor was fined and sentenced to six months in jail.

Kadambini didn’t hide. She kept seeing patients.

When people still questioned her qualifications, she sailed to Britain in 1892 and came home with three more. Along the way, she raised eight children and became one of the first women to speak at a session of the Indian National Congress.

Every time you’re the only woman in the meeting, the first in your family to build a career in a new city, the one they call “too ambitious”, you’re walking through a door Kadambini helped open.

People will always have opinions about a woman who works. Let them. You have work to do.

Our American diamond necklaces are made for women like her: modern, clean-lined and quietly brilliant, made to go from the morning meeting to the late-night deadline without missing a beat.

Wear yours the way Kadambini wore her stethoscope: as proof that you belong exactly where you are.

Kadambini by Moonelle. Rise to every occasion.