Women became important as readers as well as writers. Lives and feelings of women began to be written in vivid and intense ways. The number of women readers increased enormously in middle-class homes. Liberal fathers and husbands began educating their womenfolk at home and sent them to schools when schools for women were set up in cities and towns. Many journals carried a syllabus and attached suitable reading matter which could be used at home. From the 1860s, a few Bengali women like Kailashbashini Debi wrote books highlighting the experience of women – how they were imprisoned, kept in ignorance and forced to do hard domestic work and treated unjustly. Tarabai Shinde and Pandita Ramabai of Maharashtra in 1880,wrote with anger about the miserable lives of upper-caste Hindu women – specially widows.In Central Calcutta, an entire area called Battala was devoted to printing popular books, profusely illustrated. They were carried by pedlars to homes enabling women to read them in their leisure time. But everyone was not so liberal. Hindus (conservative) believed that a literate girl would become a widow. Muslims believed that an educated woman would be corrupted by reading.Some women had to learn to read and write in secret, like Rashsundari Debi of East Bengal.She learnt to read secretly in her kitchen and later wrote her autobiography Amar Jiban in 1876.