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

It was a question, for a short time, whether the virago would drown the young men who were trying to save her, or they would succeed in their efforts.

From Memoirs of Orange Jacobs by Orange Jacobs

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

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

Yet there are viragoes who have had the indecency to call gallantry an "insult to woman."

From Primitive Love and Love-Stories by Henry Theophilus Finck

Colette is as slender as a reed, and if Yvonne and I are far from being viragoes in times of peace, we were still weaker after a year of privation and trouble.

From Six Women and the Invasion by Gabrielle Yerta

This was the language, it appeared to Mr. Roscorla, of a virago; only, viragoes do not ordinarily have tears in their eyes, as was the case with Mabyn when she finished her indignant appeal.

From Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 88, April, 1875 by Various

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

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

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

Even the honest friendship between him and the remarkable woman he calls his "viragos" gives him many a pleasant hour.

From A Woman-Hater by Charles Reade

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