virago

Ms. Boycott chose the name — a virago is defined both as a strong, heroic woman and as a harpy — and it fit the mission, and perhaps also Ms. Callil’s persona.

From New York Times ● Oct. 29, 2022

“HLN’s virago of vengeance,” the New York Times dubbed her in 2011.

From Slate ● Oct. 13, 2016

“Jackson is an awesome virago who delivers her lines like bayonet thrusts,” Time magazine drama critic T.E.

From Washington Post ● Apr. 14, 2016

It was Taylor's ability to get into the skin of the character, more than the padding and a tousled salt-and-pepper wig, which transformed the legendary beauty into a blowsy virago.

From The Guardian ● Mar. 23, 2011

They tried to make the virago a heroine.

From Anti-Suffrage Essays by Various

Hagen can be one of the stage's great ripsnorting viragoes, as she demonstrated last year off-Broadway in the title role of Shaw's Mrs.Warren's Profession.

From Time Magazine Archive

Wodehouse still lives in the same cloud-cuckoo land of titled old blighters, muscular viragoes and fluffy-minded bachelors that he first celebrated 67 books ago.

From Time Magazine Archive

Several experiences with the tongue-lashings of176 Southern viragoes had made Si and Shorty less impressed by them than they had been earlier in their service.

From Si Klegg, Book 3 (of 6) Si And Shorty Meet Mr. Rosenbaum, The Spy, Who Relates His Adventures by John McElroy

Just as we entered the square, a scuffle took place between two viragoes about a disputed right to a washtub, and immediately the whole community was in a hubbub.

From Oliver Goldsmith A Biography by Washington Irving

I shouldn't make it one of your hoity-toity vixenish viragoes.

From The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan by Sir W. S. (William Schwenck) Gilbert

When transgender entered the popular lexicon through the efforts of activists and aid organizations in the mid-1990s, it replaced transsexual, which had replaced transvestite, which was what they called cross-dressers and before that viragos.

From Slate ● May 14, 2018

Women had been reduced to the lowest extremes of misery and suffering, had been transformed into viragos, where they once had been pleasant and peaceful; children had died off by scores.

From A Life's Secret A Novel by Mrs. Henry Wood

The study of these viragos scales down our rating of the master.

From Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 04 Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters by Elbert Hubbard

Half-a-dozen Pennsylvanian viragos surrounded and assailed me with their united tongues to a deafening degree.

From Three Months in the Southern States, April-June 1863 by Arthur James Lyon Fremantle

She felt her courage leaving her—she must be rid of this fearful band of viragos at any price.

From Joseph II. and His Court by L. (Luise) Mühlbach