Women Heroes: In search of gender balance

My daughter, Lucy, is excited to play Anne Frank in a Musée Vivant (Living Museum) her class is creating at school.   The kids chose from a pre-approved list of heroes, then created a costume and informative poster, then wait for visiting parents to push a button which will then make her launch her spiel (in French of course): 

   Je m'appelle Anne Frank.  Je suis née le 12 juin 1929...

The only problem with this project is that the list of heroes was incredibly lopsided, about 70% male.  This risks sending an unintended message to children at a an impressionable age (8-9) that heroes are mostly male (and that most female heroes are victims). 
Here are some female heroes I think should be added to the list: 

  Queen Elizabeth (I).  I am not a fan of monarchs, and detest the idea of girls wanting to be something as passive and parasitic and male-dominated as a princess waiting for a prince to arrive, but Elizabeth is an exception.  She oversaw a remarkable flourishing of the arts and sciences in England, which she ran with unprecedented efficiency (despite the ironic fears of her father, King Henry VIII, that a daughter could never be an effective leader);

  Emilie du Châtelet, who translated and explained Newton's Principia from English to French and was a guide and inspiration to Voltaire, the leading scientific female intellectual in France until Marie Curie.  She is perhaps the most important Enlightenment female that most of us have never heard of (I certainly hadn't until I started to study Voltaire and read Passionate Minds by David Bodanis and Emilie, Emilie! by Elisabeth Badinter)
  Abigail Adams, a remarkably progressive woman of the 18th century whose insight and guidance were instrumental to her more famous husband, John; she had extremely prescient views on feminism, abolition of slavery, and human nature.
  Sacagawea, who guided the Lewis and Clark expedition and was instrumental in its success.

  Clara Barton, founder of the American Red Cross (Lucy enjoyed visiting her house outside Washington, DC, now a historic landmark);
  Florence Nightingale, the founder of modern nursing and the hygiene movement (that probably saved more lives than all medical interventions combined);
 Margaret Sanger, who risked arrest to open the first family planning (a phrase she coined) clinic and helped poor women in particular to control the timing and number of their children;
  Susan B. Anthony, who fought to get American women the right to vote.
  Rosalind Franklin, without whose pioneering work in X-ray imagery of DNA, Watson and Crick won the 1962 Nobel Prize (she would have one one also but by 1958, she had died of ovarian cancer);
  Françoise Barré-Sinoussi who won a 2009 Nobel Prize for discovering HIV.

  Female novelists including the Brontë sisters, Doris Lessing, Toni Morrison, or Pearl Buck (the last three who won a Nobel Prize in literature);

  Emily Dickinson ("because I could not stop for death, he kindly stopped for me") who is enjoying quite a revival in the United States; not much is known about her personal life except what she revealed in her poems, but that is tantalizing enough to base a project on;

  Margaret Thatcher:  politics aside, she was an important female pioneer, first in the male-dominated field of chemistry in which she was trained, then by becoming the first ever British head of party and of course prime minister in 1979.
  Any of dozens of female heads of state including Isabel Martínez de Perón ("don't cry for me, Argentina!"), Switzerland's Ruth Dreifuss or Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf,  Michelle Bachelet of Chile,  Cristina Fernández de Kirchner;
  Aung San Suu Kyi who advanced human rights through non-violence and won a Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts.
  Jody Williams a Canadian activist who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997 for her role as the founding coordinator of a landmark Mine Ban Treaty.

  Samantha Power, Irish-born author and diplomat, best known for her Pulitzer Prize winning study of the Rwanda genocide (A Problem From Hell:  America and the Age of Genocide) who is now serving as the United States Ambassador to the United Nations.
  Any of the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize recipients:  Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia — the first woman to be elected president in modern Africa, peace activist Leymah Gbowee, and Tawakkol Karman of Yemen, a pro-democracy campaigner (as described by the New York Times article describing the award).

I am sure there are many other worthy candidates, but these are those that popped into mind (some with a bit of nudging from Google).