But I think Penthesileia, queen of the Amazons in the Iliad, predates them all. She gets my vote.

It’s sad, but understandable, that having a female character speak the same words in the same situation as a male character is still perceived as “off” in some way. And that female characters have to be seen as either “real women” or “acting like males.” (But then we see reviews in which “writers” are men and “women writers” are a separate category.) Women doctors, when being doctors, talk like male doctors: they use the same words, the same tools, the same diagnostic categories. Women engineers, when talking engineering, use the same tools, words, math, etc. Some people still think this is “acting like a man”–but that’s because they don’t accept that women can really be doctors, engineers, chemists, soldiers.

In fictional cultures (past, present, future) it’s possible to create a society that does not divide the same way we do along gender lines–and where saying the same things in the same situation as males in that situation is not “talking like a man” but talking like a…well, commander, corporate spy, wounded veteran, NCO, corporate CEO, research chemist, etc. What may be different in a woman gunnery sergeant in a mercenary unit from a male of the same pay grade is not what she says in combat or training…but perhaps what she says when she walks in the door and her eight year old waves a report card at her. Or maybe not. For the story, she’s got to sound like a gunny when she’s being a gunny.

In a volume of Welsh Ballads I read repeatedly while in college, one was “The Ballad of Ievan’s Wife” which reported a similar situation (wife left at home while husband is out somewhere and she successfully leads the household to drive off attackers.) The refrain brags on “Ievan’s” strength and war-skills, but ends “But better still than Ievan…Ievan’s wife.”

In the 19th century, a Russian woman ran away from an unhappy marriage and her child, dressed as a youth, and joined the Cossacks, campaigning successfully for several years in Poland–a miserable life as the translation of her memoirs makes clear (badly supplied, ill-clothed, often hungry and always cold or wet) but better than being married, to her. She was eventually discovered to be female, and pled with the Czar to be allowed to continue her military service.

In genre, the first would be Jirel of Joiry by C.L. Moore (first showing up in a story in _Weird Tales_ in the mid 1930s, if I’ve got my dates right.) I read some of the Jirel stories (and others by Moore) in the late 1950s, when I discovered our town library’s SF collection.

It depends, too, on how you define “kick-ass” (not a term I particularly like, but that’s just me…) If you insist on the woman being triumphantly successful, it’s many fewer–most adventurers, soldiers, etc. came to a hard end, male or female. I would include Boudicca, myself, and any other woman who led troops in battle. Maeve, in Ireland, Scathach in Scotland (said to have trained Cuchulain.)

(read a whole bunch of non-fiction about her, once.)

I do agree that there is a place for stories about specifically female experience, and even more for stories that present the female experience as “universal” in the same way male experience is supposed to be. But there’s also a place for stories in which you just get to be the Most Important Person, without gender being an issue.

So it amazed me to play a game where there was no equivocation about a female hero, none of the fluffing and rationalization that surrounds female heroes written as women: no justification for why she has no family, why she’s in the military, why she’s so tough. There’s no need to soften/feminize her, nor does she have to prove that she’s better than the men. In short, female heroes usually have extra steps just to be accepted by the audience as someone in a position a man would be in, no questions asked.

I think DA2 may have been the best about it, because there were twinges of sexism in Mass Effect that, while believable for a female hero, still made me wince because the game is so good at otherwise not gendering the experience. So getting called a petname, princess, or a b**** is jarring, like hearing a man being disrespected that way. You get used to that level of neutrality– it’s not respect, because there are characters that disrespect you, but it’s like men disrespecting each other.

*There are important parts of the women’s experience that can/should be addressed as a “person” experience as well, so I don’t mean that they need to be removed. But I don’t think they need to be addressed every time and in every story. Like a lifelong military space-commander. Her story isn’t going to be the same as a man’s, but most of those differences may not come to bear on the story, just like they don’t bear on every last life experience a woman has.