virago

It was someone laying down the law — without worrying that a man would label her a virago or harridan or termagant.

From New York Times ● Dec. 7, 2019

“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

"You stay right where you are, Teddy dearie," the virago commanded.

From I Walked in Arden by Jack Crawford

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

Behind them came a woman escorted by two coarse, red-faced viragoes.

From The Tremendous Event by Maurice Leblanc

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

She smiled grimly to watch Mrs. Macanany and viragoes like her pouring oil on the flames and drumming the weak-kneed up and screaming against "blacklegging" as a thing accurst.

From The Workingman's Paradise An Australian Labour Novel by John Maurice Miller

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

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

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

Come on, then, plague, war, famine and viragos!

From Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II by Herman Melville

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