Although the backlash against The Force Awakens focused largely on the fact that it was A New Hope in different garb, another criticism of it from the less-enlightened parts of the Internet was that it was promoting so-called "feminist propaganda" and that, based on the huge success of The Force Awakens, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story was greenlit with a female lead.
Not only is that a painfully stupid theory, it's also so completely wrong as to be laughable.
Like it or not, Star Wars was always about strong women and both The Force Awakens and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story are merely continuing that grand tradition. It's well-known that when George Lucas was writing early drafts of Star Wars, he toyed with the idea of removing Princess Leia from the script entirely - because he envisioned the story arc of Luke Skywalker as originally featuring a young woman instead.
The first time we're introduced to Princess Leia in 1977's A New Hope, she's an Imperial Senator who's delivering vital plans to the Rebellion that'll decide the course of the entire film. Sure, she's captured - but only after shooting dead a Stormtrooper and getting said plans off the ship. When she's taken away to the Death Star to meet Tarkin, the first words out of her mouth is insulting the guy.
Princess Leia literally doesn't give a s*** about it and doesn't even give up the secret location of the Rebellion after she's tortured by an interrogation droid - with Darth Vader watching.
It's only when Tarkin decides to blow up her home planet - where everyone she's ever known or loved lives - that she gives up the location. Even then, it's a bait-and-switch because she knows that Tarkin's probably going to destroy the planet anyway. Throughout the entirety of A New Hope, Princess Leia is addressed as a leader. She literally takes charge of her own rescue attempt because Han Solo, Luke Skywalker and Chewbacca bungle the whole thing.
It's the same in The Empire Strikes Back, Princess Leia is a military leader and accepted as such without question. Nobody bats an eye that she's in the control room at Hoth and she's the first one that's suspicious of Lando Calrissian when they get to Cloud City. In Return Of The Jedi and the infamous metal bikini, she literally uses the choke-chain that Jabba The Hutt has on her to murder him. She wraps the highly-sexualised imagery around the slithering monster's neck and strangles him to death with it. It might be heavy-handed symbolism, but it gets the point across - Princess Leia is no man's woman. Even in the lore of the original trilogy, women are at the forefront. The leader of the Rebel Alliance is Mon Mothma, an elder Senator who's been forced down the path of rebellion after exhausting diplomatic solutions.
It isn't just on screen that Star Wars has had strong women, either.
A New Hope's sense of pace and narrative was largely down to Marcia Lucas' incredible skilling with editing. She previously worked with Martin Scorsese on Taxi Driver and Lucas' previous efforts, Taxi Driver and THX 1138. Many credit Marcia Lucas' efforts with saving A New Hope; she'd later go on to edit The Empire Strikes Back (and was uncredited for it) and Return Of The Jedi. Leigh Brackett, one of the most highly respected sci-fi authors and screenwriters of our time, co-wrote the screenplay for The Empire Strikes Back with Lawrence Kasdan. In fact, she was Lucas' first choice to write the screenplay, having written the screenplay for Westerns like Rio Bravo and El Dorado. Sadly, Brackett passed away shortly after delivering the screenplay from cancer and wasn't involved with the rewrites with Kasdan and Lucas.
Kathleen Kennedy, who now runs Lucasfilm, began her career as a production associate on Raiders Of The Lost Ark, a film George Lucas was heavily involved in. When announcing the new generation of Star Wars films at the Star Wars Celebration in Anaheim in 2015, Kennedy pointed out that as long as she involved in Star Wars, there was going to be more women involved in the franchise both in front of the camera and behind the scenes - because Star Wars was, all the way back in 1977 and to this day, about strong women.
