Women who kicked ass

Phantasy said:
I'd also like to mention:

the kick ass women who home school girls under Taliban rule, fully knowing the repercussions of being caught.

Bill_the_Cat said:
Harriet Tubman
Escaped slave, emancipator, Union spy, suffragette and a lifelong sufferer of disabling seizures, headaches, and powerful visionary and dream activity, and spells of hypersomnia as a result of a traumatic head injury early in life.

She was the first woman to break the sound barrier (with Chuck Yeager right on her wing), the first woman to fly a jet across the ocean, and the first woman to fly a bomber across the Atlantic. She won five Harmon Trophies as the outstanding woman pilot in the world. Sometimes called the "Speed Queen," at the time of her death, no pilot, man or woman, held more speed, distance or altitude records in aviation history, than Jackie Cochran.[6]

Following America's entry into the War, in 1942 she was made director of women's flight training for the United States.[8] As head of the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) she supervised the training of more than one thousand women pilots at the former Avenger Field in Sweetwater, Texas. For her war efforts, she received the Distinguished Service Medal[9][10] and the Distinguished Flying Cross.

At war's end, she was hired by a magazine to report on global postwar events. In this role, she witnessed Japanese General Tomoyuki Yamashita's surrender in the Philippines, then was the first (non-Japanese) woman to enter Japan after the War and attended the Nuremberg Trials in Germany.

Postwar, she began flying the new jet engine aircraft, going on to set numerous records, most conspiciously, she became the first woman pilot to "go supersonic."

Encouraged by then-Major Chuck Yeager, with whom she shared a lifelong friendship, on May 18, 1953, at Rogers Dry Lake, California, Cochran flew a Canadair F-86 Sabre jet borrowed from the Royal Canadian Air Force at an average speed of 652.337 mph, becoming the first woman to break the sound barrier.[11]

She was also the first woman to land and take off from an aircraft carrier, the first woman to reach Mach 2, the first woman to pilot a bomber across the North Atlantic (in 1941), the first woman enshrined in the Aviation Hall of Fame in Dayton, Ohio, the first pilot to make blind (instrument) landing, the ONLY woman to ever be President of the Federation Aeronautique lnt'l (1958-1961), the first woman to fly a fixed-wing, jet aircraft across the Atlantic, the first pilot to fly above 20,000 feet with an oxygen mask and the first woman to enter the Bendix Trans-continental Race. She still holds more distance and speed records than any pilot living or dead, male or female.

After her husband deserted her, she began studying law in the office of a local judge, and after being denied admission to Hastings College of the Law because of her gender, she sued, argued her own case, and won admission. She passed the bar exam in 1878, but California law at the time allowed only white males to become members of the bar. Foltz authored a state bill which replaced "white male" with "person," and in September 1878, she was the first woman admitted to the California bar. She later also became licensed to practice law in New York.

Not satisfied with becoming a hometown attorney, Foltz became a leader in the woman's voting rights movement. During a career that spanned 56 years, Clara almost single-handedly pushed a great deal of progressive legislation for women's rights in the voting and legal fields.

At the Chicago World's Fair in 1893, during a "congress" of the Board of Lady Managers, Foltz introduced her idea of the public defender, with a speech entitled "Rights of Persons Accused of Crime--Abuses Now Existing." Foltz's then-radical concept of providing assistance to indigent criminal defendants is used today throughout the United States. She also created a similar model for the California Parole System.

Her many other trail-blazing accomplishments included becoming the first female clerk for the State Judiciary Committee; the first woman appointed to the State Board of Corrections; the first female licensed Notary Public; the first woman named director of a major bank; and, in 1930, the first woman to run for Governor of California, at the age of eighty-one.