There is a huge difference though, between a female character that is supposed to be a badass and therefor is created to basically be a man with a female body, and a female who actually acts in a way that makes sense.
I disagree, and Ripley, as portrayed in
Alien, is the archetype that became the template for characters like Aeryn Sun, Trinity, Sam Carter, and Kara Thrace*. As MaryKB already said, kicking butt is not a strictly masculine quality, and it was
Alien that broke that mold**, and it did it by having a woman behave as a man would. Ripley was literally a male character with a female body, and yet her behavior was entirely sensible for a woman; by the end of the movie, the only men left alive were the xenomorph and Jonesy the cat. Eventually, regardless of whether you're a man or a woman, it's just you and the tiger: You fight, or you die.
In
Aliens, the screenwriters obviously knew who Ripley was and folded some traditional, maternal qualities into the character (in the extended edition of
Aliens, Ripley is revealed to actually be a mother, having outlived her daughter while in her 57-year hypersleep between movies - in the PC game
Alien: Isolation, the main character is Ripley's grown daughter). This version of the character - the tough mother - shows up again, too, in characters like the aforementioned Sarah Connor in
Terminator 2 and Charly Baltimore (Geena Davis) in
The Long Kiss Goodnight - an underrated movie that I heartily endorse, if you haven't seen it.
* At first blush, Emily Blunt's character in
Edge of Tomorrow looks like another of Ripley's daughters - and she is - but she was actually the Wise Elder who trains and prepares The Chosen One for the final battle. Yoda, Miyagi, Gandalf, Morpheus in
The Matrix.
** Although
Star Wars was first by a couple of years, Carrie Fisher was essentially playing Katharine Hepburn (so was Margot Kidder in 1978's
Superman), while Ripley was something new.