This list of 20 classic female YA protagonists claims to have them "ranked." We're not told by what criteria, but by reading through the list one can infer that the ranking is based on, in the colloquial, "badassery." Independence, intelligence, capacity for taking action on one's own intellectually and creatively seem to be the common factors in the high-ranking protagonists, along with a certain sense of quirkiness unique to their specific books.
I'm not sure if it's fair to rank these protagonists and the books to which they belong as "better" or "worse" than one another. After all, while they're all considered "classic" they come from a wide variety of time periods where different standards were the social norm. I'm not saying that in 1913 (when "Pollyanna" was first published) every girl should have wanted to be like her; rather, it's what people expected to see in YA novels "for girls." Once 1979 rolled around it was more acceptable to present young women as they really are: awkward, out of sorts, dissatisfied, creative, brilliant, and fantastic.
So perhaps instead of being a ranked list, this collection of protagonists should be considered a scale of the traditional representation of female domesticity, or a representation of blandest to quirkiest. One might even base some sort of measure of likeability on how closely the protagonists on the list conform to our modern ideal of what being a young woman should be all about. However you choose to view it, enjoy this collection of 20 very different female protagonists from classic YA literature.
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