Neelima was a career academic. She taught in respectively the Khulna Coronation Girls' School, Loreto House, the Victoria Institution, and finally at the
University of Dhaka, where she was appointed as a lecturer in 1956, and as a professor of Bengali in 1972. Such women were accorded the title
Birangona (war heroine) by the Government of Bangladesh, but this did not prevent them from being stigmatized. Appalled by newspaper accounts that some victims of sexual violence preferred to be sent to prisoner of war camps in India with their Pakistani rapists, rather than endure familial rejection and social scorn in Bangladesh, Ibrahim was moved to interview them. She published a collection of seven of these first-person narratives in her two-volume
Ami Birangona Bolchi (
The Voices of War Heroines) in 1994 and 1995. Social anthropologist Nayanika Mookherjee writes that, "The text suggests that ... 'traditional, backward Islamic norms' cause the rejection of raped women and contribute to their trauma." Bangladeshi academic
Firdous Azim describes the book as "path-breaking" and "an integral part of a feminist historicizing of the war of liberation in Bangladesh." ==Works==