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

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

She dreaded not free-quarters, or the visits of virago soldiers' wives, now that Lord Glandore was back to protect Norah.

From My Lords of Strogue Vol. III, (of III) A Chronicle of Ireland, from the Convention to the Union by Lewis Wingfield

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

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

And ever an anon, with crapulous glee, Grinned homage to viragoes on the shore.

From Adventures in Criticism by Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

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

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

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

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

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

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