This week, BBC Online Magazine proudly celebrates the life and complete badassery of the late Susan Travers, who would have been 100.

Travers was (and is) the only woman to have been a member of the French Foreign Legion. During her later years, surprised reactions to seeing her with the tell-tale red and blue ribbon would not have been unusual, especially given the Legion’s reputation and standing within France. For our American and non-French readership, let us say that the Foreign Legion, a military unit for foreign nationals who wish to serve in the French Armed Forces that is commanded by French officers, is notoriously tough. Because soldiers in the Legion hail from all over, a sense of cohesion is developed through rigorous training that is both physically and mentally extreme. Starting to get the idea?

Although including nude women in film as often as possible seems to be a current industry standard in Hollywood, it wasn’t always so. The very first, scandalous instance of female nudity in a non-pornographic film occurred in a 1915 film titled Inspiration — Audrey Munson played a sculptor’s model in a film that would end up buried with the passage of time, along with her bittersweet legacy.

Just last week we posted an article about this amazing picture of four women wielding a fire hose, understood for years to be a depiction of women firefighters rushing to the job during the attacks on Pearl Harbor seventy years ago this month. Their identities were unknown. Just last week, MSNBC decided that this was a mystery well worth solving, and solve it they have. The last surviving woman from this picture is the ninety-six-year-old Katherine Lowe; mother of eight and grandmother, great-grandmother, and great-great-grandmother of too many for MSNBC to count; and she’s got a lot of revelatory things to say about the photo, its origins, and the place that she and the other women actually had in the war effort.

Yesterday marked the 70th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor and to commemorate, MSNBC posted a slew of photographs taken that day. What’s likely to become a new iconic photo is a shot of several women fighting at fire at the scene. And now, the world wants to know who they are. Hit the jump for the full image. 

Ladies, did you know it was unbecoming to talk about clothes around a man on a date? The key to getting a fella to put a ring on it in decades past was all about keeping your emotions, lady secrets, and basically any indication of a personality or individual humanity at bay (and also sitting properly). Unless you want to be left single and alone, with no one to love you. And in the late 1930s, you didn’t want to be “That Woman.” Retronaut unearthed this magazine editorial from 1938, which gives single women dating tips that will render her completely robotic — but probably married! Hooray!

We were only just tipped off to the existence of TakeBackHalloween.org, or believe me, we would have been telling you about it all month. But in a holiday season that seems to bring a new shock of “why would anyone want a sexified costume of that?” every year, Take Back Halloween is a rising sun spreading its rays across a gloomy moor.

It would be one thing to make a small website dedicated to suggesting a racially and culturally diverse list of historical and mythical women, warriors, queens, and goddesses that would make great Halloween costumes. It’s above and beyond the pale to then detail, with links to available retailers and diagrams of how to make a bedsheet into a historically accurate toga and suggestions of how to style hair and makeup, exactly how to put the costume together.

And include relevant historical information on why that particular lady was so badass.

Hollywood, we have to talk. I’ve spoken to every ticket-buyer in America and we’ve all decided that you need to make more movies about badass women. Like, starting yesterday. Oh sure, every now and then you will throw us a Salt or maybe even a Salt II, but face it, Hollywood, many of your attempts at a woman-driven action movies have been half-assed at best and soul-crushingly awful at worst (see Electra, Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li, or, dear God, Sucker Punch).

It should not be that hard, Hollywood. All we, the ticket-buying public of America want is a good story about a woman or a bunch of women who fight and shoot and do other badass things badassedly. And guess what?  You don’t even have to make up any stories on your own.  Real life badass women have existed throughout history! Just do a Wikipedia search on “woman warrior.” That article ain’t no stub. You could make a great movie about any of these women.

Don’t know where to start, Hollywood?  You would like it if someone compiled a list for you? Well, I just happen to have one right here that I always carry in case of emergency.