Women as protagonists are easy to find in the context of this stream.
In the following scene, Alisa Selezneva impresses her new class by having a conversation with their teacher, Alla Sergeevna, about London:
(TV show based on a sci-fi series started in the mid-1960's)
The solist in the following song from "Hussar Ballad", Shura Azarov/Shurochka Azarova, is pretending to be a male cadet in order to fight the XIX french.
(movie based on the memoirs of a historical tomboy who served in the cavalry, published 1836)
Finally, "Miss Pavlichenko" may have a written biography somewhere, but I learned about her from a recent movie:
(and, it being the XX, she didn't have to pretend to be male)