"Too often tyrant, virago and frequently heavy drinker, all in one," they get their own chapter in "The Servant Problem: An Attempt at its Solution", published in 1899.
Unfolding a harrowing portrait of a disintegrating family, Stead examines the hostility between a husband and wife: Sam Pollit, revealed to be a tyrannical crank far removed from the civilized man he thinks he is, whose claim to love his children lends the ironic title; and Henny, who has become a bitter virago.
It often had the virago sleeve full at elbow and shoulder and drawn in at intervals by strings of narrow ribbon that appears in most 17th-century portraits of American women and children.
You don't normally think of her as being one for comedy - although her cut-glass Washington virago in the Coen Brothers' screwball Burn After Reading was one of the year's surprises.
In the final analysis it made little sense to exchange one virago for another, and the ambassadors and courtiers who, in 1546, thought that Henry was about to take a seventh wife were disillusioned.
In its pages, Rosalind Franklin becomes Rosy, a bluestocking virago who hoards her data, stubbornly misses their import, and occasionally threatens Watson and others with physical violence — but who might not be "totally uninteresting" if she "took off her glasses and did something novel with her hair".
Set in a nightmarish Miami in the garish nineteen-eighties, the film follows a sweet little boy who has a boom box made of cardboard and a tabloid virago of a mother.
The passions rekindled the stereotypes of gender war — bullying husband, vengeful wife; virago woman versus feckless man; female advance subverted by male ambition — magnified by schadenfreude, overlaid with the Aristotelian progression from tragic error to inevitable downfall.
She worked up to quavers, breaks, near-sobs and near-screams; her eyes grew wide and wild, and her face took on the expression of a virago.
So she tacked in a softer, more vulnerable direction, drawing attention to the revelations of bulimia and alcoholism in a just-published memoir whose "sentimentality and self-deprecating girlishness might leaven her image as a brash virago," Michelle Goldberg observed in The Daily Beast.
Indeed, she is most appreciated when she plays well with others in the Senate or the State Department; when she behaves like a fierce competitor, she is compared to Glenn Close's bunny-boiling virago from "Fatal Attraction".
