In Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and A Sun God From Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human, Grant Morrison tells us how Count Giovanni Pico della Mirandola's Oration on the Dignity of Man is regarded as the foundation of the "humanist" movement: 

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Pico tells us that we have a tendency to reenact the stories we tell ourselves. We learn as much (and sometimes more that's useful) from our fiction role models as we do from the real people who share our lives. If we perpetually reinforce the notion that human beings are somehow unnatural aberrations adrift in the ever-encroaching Void, that story will take root in impressionable minds and inform the art, politics, and general discourse of our culture in anti-life, anti-creative, and potentially catastrophic ways. If we spin a tale of guilt and failure with an unhappy ending, we will live that story to its conclusion, and some benighted final generation not far down the line will pay the price. If, on the other hand, we emphasize our glory, intelligence, grace, generosity, discrimination, honesty, capacity for love, creativity, and native genous, those qualities will be made manifest in our behavior and in our works. It should give us hope that superhero stories are flourishing everywhere because they are a bright flickering sign of our need to move on, to imagine the better, more just, and more proactive people we can be. 

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Superheroes teach us about life, environmentalism, politics, and love. They tell us where we are going and what can happen if we are not careful and go down a path of wrath and ingorance. They tell us that a sun god from Smallville can save the world, a soldier can defy orders against the might of the world if he feels something is wrong, a vigilante can stand up for the good of Gotham City, an Amazon can hold peace in her heart even when she goes to war, a battered woman is stronger than she thinks, an abuse victim can find her own way through her truama, and a woman in a wheelchair can still save lives. All of this, we can learn through the storytelling of comic books.

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Heroes are meant to be the best we find in ourselves. In The Supergirls, Mike Madrid tells us that superheroines "present a different perspective in not only the battle of good and evil, but also in the quest to make the world a better place." Though the solutions are not as simple as we want them to be, these heroines take great pains to improve their universe as well as ours.

 

As a marginalized minority in a male dominated world, we can follow these women's footsteps: Wonder Woman's strength and fight for equality and sisterhood, Batgirl's fight to clean up Gotham City, Harley Quinn's fight to find herself in the aftermath of a bad relationship, and Jessica Jones' fight to continue life in spite of truama. We have the tools to be the heroes we need. Now it's time to be the heroes we deserve.