In her opera Mrs. President, Bond tells the story of the first woman to run for President of the United States. Victoria Woodhull was a true revolutionary who fought for women’s rights under the law. An entrepreneur, she had a stock brokerage firm on Wall Street and her own newspaper. Woodhull ran for the country’s highest office in 1872, before women had been granted the right to vote. She was jailed on election night as a result of revealing preacher Henry Ward Beecher as a womanizer. The final scene of Mrs. President finds Woodhull in her prison cell, silenced but not defeated, looking ahead to future generations of women who will rise up to realize her vision of equality: “From my ashes a thousand more will rise. They will seize what I’ve begun, hold it high and carry it on. Arise!”