4 ideas
Gloriana de Lara disguises herself as a young man, Hector D'Estrange, and is educated at Eton and Oxford. Her sex is exposed and she is imprisoned, but the reform survives, and an epilogue set in 1999 shows a Britain where women hold full equality in public life.
The apparent intellectual and physical weakness of women is not natural. It is produced by denying them the schooling, exercise and public responsibility given to boys. Give a girl a boy's education and a boy's opportunities, and she will perform as well as any man. The supposed natural difference is therefore evidence of the unequal system, not a justification for it.
Hold the person's ability constant and change only how observers perceive their sex. If praise, votes and authority follow the perceived gender rather than the performance, then the judgment was about the category, not the merit. Revealing the disguise afterward forces the audience to confront the fact that they already endorsed a woman's competence.
The heroine founds a disciplined, uniformed corps of women volunteers trained in physical and martial skills. The corps shows that women can supply the bodily strength and collective discipline that were used to justify excluding them from citizenship. It also gives the movement organized force that cannot be dismissed as mere petitioning.