Gender in speculative fiction
The first known female superhero is writer-artist Fletcher Hanks's minor character Fantomah, an ageless, ancient Egyptian woman in the modern day who could transform into a skull-faced creature with superpowers to fight evil; she debuted in 1940 in Fiction Houses "Jungle Comics".
Lois Lane
Lois gained her first series of stories (without Superman) starting with "Superman" #28 (May–June 1944), "Lois Lane, Girl Reporter", running in the "Superman" comic book for a number of years, had Lois defeating bad guys and getting front-page stories on her own, without any help from Superman.