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

Yet, tellingly, this virago is also the creation of a male writer-director.

From The Guardian ● Jan. 11, 2018

“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

The virago, however, turned a deaf ear to this.

From Bartholomew Sastrow Being the Memoirs of a German Burgomaster by Bartholomew Sastrow

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

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

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

From The Tremendous Event by Maurice Leblanc

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

No, no; 'goodness,' as you call it, don't depend on little Miss Joy, or wickedness on sharp-tempered viragos like you say your aunt is.

From Little Miss Joy by Emma Marshall

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

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 John Paris

"If I were you I would see my sister in spite of all the old viragos in Exeter," said Mrs. Trevelyan.

From He Knew He Was Right by Anthony Trollope