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".
Luana Walters
Walters was the first actress to portray Superman's biological mother Lara in a live-action format. She appeared in "Superman Comes to Earth", the first chapter of the 1948 "Superman" movie serial starring Kirk Alyn as Superman. Portions of this depiction appear in flashback in "At the Mercy of Atom Man!", the seventh chapter of the 1950 serial "Atom Man vs. Superman". She worked in a number of movie serials and B-Movies, especially in Westerns, featuring her riding skills, and sci-fi or horror genres. She played a female reporter on the trail of a fiend's story in "The Corpse Vanishes" (1942), with Bela Lugosi. She appears as a cellblock guard in "Girls in Prison" (1956). Her final role came in "The She Creature" (1956).