I'm not sure what you do with the fact that Betty started out as a dog. Her career is also a good example of how the Hays Office affected many features.
Her career also mirrors the trajectory of many newspaper stripes of the twenties and thirties. In the late twenties, single social strips were big for women-- Blondie (whose maiden name was Boopadoop) started out about the adventures of a cute flapper girl, and another feature called Boots and Her Buddies was about a young woman and her many beaus. These kind of strips, along with adventure strips, dominated the comics page, but by the mid/late thirties they had been replaced with domestic strips.
Blondie met Dagwood (originally an heir to the Bumstead fortune who risked being disinherited to be with her) and Boots settled down and got married. Captain Easy, an adventure strip in the Terry and the Pirates mode, switched focus to his sidekick Wash Tubbs and his home life with wife and kids.
Betty switches from adventures in foreign lands with adoring men to hanging around the house with that puppy.
I'm trying to think of other women in early animation, but of course there's not much. Even after Disney had his first feature hit with a female lead, he didn't use a woman lead character again for...what, six? more films.
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