Action Girl/Real Life

Joan of Arc was a French peasant girl who heard the voice of God instructing her to expel the hated English from France. According to her own words (which nobody ever bothers to consult), she actually never killed anybody, though she did courageously lead armies into battle. Was eventually betrayed and burned at the stake, but the legend lives on.
- Though this page's quote is about her from Shakespeare's "Henry VI Part 1", Joan of Arc was actually a Dark Action Girl in that play. (She wasn't popular in England. I wonder why.)
Artemisia of Caria fought at the Battle of Salamis, commanding five Persian ships against the Greeks. Her ship was nearly captured by the Greek navy, but she turned and rammed one of her own fleet's ships, sinking it and escaping. Nevertheless, she was praised by Xerxes for her ruthless ingenuity.
- The poetic quote from Xerxes: "My men have become women and my women have become men."
Female Soviet snipers achieved some of the highest individual kill counts of the Second World War; Lyudmila Pavlichenko is generally regarded as the deadliest, with 309 confirmed kills.
Two Soviet female fighter aces of World War 2: Lydia Litvyak and Katya Budanova. The whole of the 586th Fighter Regiment who were all female pilots.
- The top-scoring female fighter pilot of the war was Olga Yamshchikova (17 kills), a former flight instructor.
- Then there was the 46th Taman Guards Night Bomber Aviation Regiment, who made use of obsolete and generally pacific but nimble wooden biplanes Po-2 to fly under the veil of night and drop bombs. And since the carrying capacity of the planes was rather poor girls would leave the parachutes to take some more bombs aboard. Germans called them "night witches". Yeah!
Zenobia of Palmyra.
Fights between female gladiators was a standard gimmick in the games of ancient Rome, and female gladiators nearly always fought topless. Fan Service is older than we think...
Japanese has Onna-bugeisha, girls who embrace Samurai tropes.
- The Kunoichi, the general term for the other side of the spectrum, the female Ninja.
- Tomoe Gozen.
- Actually, many Yamato Nadeshiko were expected to at least know the basics of self defense, in case their households were under attack when the samurai and guards were out in the war. The naginata spear was specifically created to be used for women: its lenght allowed the Yamato Nadeshiko to keep attackers at bay easily, then stab/slash them with the pointy tip.
  - As a bonus, whenever a girl of a samurai family left her home to work in the city, she was given a tanto dagger before her departure. She was expected to either use it to commit Seppuku (or better said, jidai) if her honor demanded it, the other was for specific self-defense.
Yim Wing Chun. You know someone's an Action Girl when she has a martial arts style named after her.
Ching Shih was one of the most badass pirates of all time. And best of all, she was able to get away with everything, keep all of her loot and avoid suffering the indignity of a death by hanging. As pirates go, Anne Bonny and Mary Read.
The White Mouse, Nancy Wake. The leading figure of La Résistance, top of the Gestapo's most wanted list, coordinated and lead numerous attacks, and once killed an SS sentry with her bare hands to keep him from raising an alarm. After the war, this Badass lady lived to the age of 98. Rest in peace, Ms. Wake, you are an inspiration to us all.
Boudica.
Anita Garibaldi, partner and wife of the famous Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi.
Flora Jessop was born and raised in the polygamist FLDS cult. When faced with an arranged marriage and after years of horrific abuse, she escaped from the cult and is now an advocate for women and children trying to escape as well. She is Badass. She's a good marksman and always carries a gun (or two) to fend off the many cultist enemies she has made and to protect the innocent women and children she saves from the desert compounds. She risks her life on a regular basis to save these kids and put their abusers behind bars. Also, she has a very nice leather jacket.
Lakshimibai, Rani of Jhansi. Queen of a small Indian principality, the British tried to disinherit her and take over, invoking the "Doctrine of Lapse" allowing them to do this in case of a female heir. She fought back, and to the death. Now often seen in statue form in cities around India.
Lieutenant Colonel Nicole "FiFi" Malachowski is an F-15 pilot in the US Air Force, and the first woman to serve as a pilot in the USAF Thunderbirds demonstration team.
Really, any woman in the army is an Action Girl by default.
Bushi Matsumura, one of the founders of modern karate, was married to a woman named Yonamine Chiru, who had set up a real-life Engagement Challenge that any man asking for her hand had to defeat her in hand-to-hand combat. Matsumura, one of the most feared fighters in Okinawan history, only just managed it. After they were married, he would sometimes send her to deal with bandits around the island.
Mao Zedong's third wife, He Zishen, is said to have been one of these.
Kenau Hasselaer, a widowed saleswoman of wood, who fiercely fought the Spainards at the Siege of Haarlem. During the seige, she led a band of three hundred women in battle armed with burning hay and boiling water, and provided wood for Dutch ships. She wasn't afraid to get her hands dirty herself; historical accounts often speak of how "manly" she would behave in battle, wielding spears, swords and guns. She had a reputation of being fierce out of battle as well (she had a habit of suing everyone, including the very city she helped defend), and her name "Kenau" has become a slang term for either a bitchy or manly woman in Dutch.
Julie d'Aubigny aka "Mademoiselle Maupin.
Trude "I'll see your six, and raise you thirty-five" Lacklandia, the first female knight of the Society for Creative Anachronism.
- That's Sir Trude to you.
Grace O'Malley, "The Pirate Queen of Connaught". She got her own page on Badass of the Week.
Nusaybah bint Kaab, 7th century Muslim warrior who fought beside the Prophet Muhammad at the Battle of Uhud and saved his life by acting as a human shield. And in case that wasn't badass enough, while lying at death's doorstep after the battle, she heard Muhammad call for volunteers to pursue the retreating enemy and got up to answer, whereupon she passed out from blood loss due to the approximately 12 wounds she had sustained the day before. She survived.
In Bolivia, there's Cholita wrestling. Young and not-so-young Bolivian women get into the wrestling rings, all dolled up with their hair in long braids and colorful outfits, and then both hilarity and Crazy Awesome ensue.
Though the Mongols have a history of badass lady empresses, Mandukhai Khatun [1] is perhaps better known. Freshly widowed, she had the choice of marrying her well-beloved general or a rival Muslim warlord, and chose to rule in her own right until her adopted heir came of age. In that time, she reunited her people, reconquered chunks of their lost territory, and fought off both encroaching tribes and the Ming. She frequently went into battle with her men, most notably on one occasion while pregnant.
This article mentions a talented female Nigeran sniper captured in Libya.
Archeologists have uncovered a number of Scythian/Sarmatian tombs of armed women; these have been speculated to have inspired the legend of the Amazons.
Countess Markievicz was a politician, suffragette and freedom fighter. Having fought during the 1916 rising, she was captured and sentenced to death, but had it commuted due to her being a woman. Her response? "I do wish your lot had the decency to shoot me".
All the women of the Special Operations Executive. They were sent into occupied France during World War II as radio operators to help the Resistance. Several of them were captured. None of them talked. Noor Inayat Khan, in particular, fought so fiercely when the Nazis caught up with her that they were afraid of her and she was classified as "highly dangerous"!
Qiu Jin, Chinese feminist and martial artist who ran a girls' athletic school secretly dedicated to anti-imperialist military training. That's right, she ran a whole school full of Action Girls!
Hannie Schaft, nicknamed "the girl with the red hair", was a member of the communist resistance during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. She killed many informants and (secret) policemen who worked for the Nazis. Fluent in German, she even maintained relations with some soldiers. When one chapter of the communist Council of Resistance murdered a farmer without authorization from the higher-ups she provided the Nazis with files on the killers, who were arrested, tortured and killed. She was captured shortly before the end of the war, and despite an understanding between the occupation forces and the resistance not to kill women, she was executed by firing squad. When the executioner missed, she was said to have replied "I shoot better than you", after which another soldier sprayed her with bullets from his submachinegun.
Rukhsana Kauser, age 18, managed to disarm several militants who invaded her family's home in Kashmir, killing one with his own AK-47 and injuring the other two. Her brother helped.

Ms Kauser said she grabbed one of the militants by the hair and banged his head against the wall. When he fell down she hit him with an axe, before snatching his rifle.
"I had never touched a rifle before this, let alone fired one. But I had seen heroes firing in films on TV and I tried the same way. Somehow I gathered courage - I fired and fought till dead tired."