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

The girl, pulling up her skirts, began to dance and shout, and to behave like a virago, among the throng of loiterers who were peopling the pavement.

From A Second Coming by Marsh, Richard

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

Our ladies can give their dearest up to death when the State calls on them, but they will never be like the odious viragoes of the Roman circus.

From The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions Joints In Our Social Armour by Runciman, James

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

From Primitive Love and Love-Stories by Finck, Henry Theophilus

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 Irving, Washington

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

Little Asako had nothing in common with the argumentative heroines of Bernard Shaw or with the desperate viragos of Ibsen, to whom Sadako felt herself spiritually akin.

From Kimono by Paris, John

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 Wood, Mrs. Henry

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 Mühlbach, L. (Luise)

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 Reade, Charles