in the White House

The Inauguration of the 46th President

USA TODAY SPECIAL EDITION

Jill Biden continued teaching while her husband was vice president, and she plans to do the same as first lady. TORI LYNN SCHNEIDER/TALLAHASSEE DEMOCRAT

Jill Biden ready to go back to work

Incoming first lady plans to keep her day job

Maria Puente

USA TODAY

The first thing to know about Jill Biden — a college professor with four degrees, including a doctorate — is that she is going to be a very busy first lady, since she plans to keep her day job after moving into the White House.

After all, she continued teaching English at Northern Virginia Community College during the eight years her husband was vice president.

Her plan to pursue her career and keep a paying job sets her apart from her predecessors in the 232-year history of presidential spouses.

“She will really be bringing the role of first lady into the 21st century,” says Katherine Jellison, a history professor at Ohio University and recognized expert on first ladies. Jellison notes that no previous wife of a president has been “allowed” to be like most modern American women, with both a work life and a family life.

“Americans have historically wanted their first ladies to be in the White House and at the president’s side whenever possible,” Jellison says.

“The winds of change are blowing because the country keeps moving; this was bound to happen,” says Anita McBride, who was chief of staff to former first lady Laura Bush and an assistant to President George W. Bush, and now runs the Legacies of America’s First Ladies Initiative at American University’s School of Public Affairs.

A professorial calm

There’s another thing to know about Jill Biden, and about Joe Biden: They project serenity, which turned out to be a vital quality in the 2020 election. The Bidens come to the White House after a tight election and a slow vote count (due to the huge number of pandemic-inspired mail-in ballots), made even more tense by the angry public rantings of the incumbent president, who tried to stop the vote counts, filed lawsuits in multiple states, shouted unfounded allegations about fraud and hinted that he might not accept the results.

Throughout, both Bidens remained calm and pressed for everyone else to do the same. It’s likely to be the same once Jill Biden takes up the role of first lady.

Considering her profession, you can count on education being at the top of Biden’s first-lady agenda, along with advocating for military families and cancer awareness (son Beau Biden, an Army veteran, died of brain cancer in 2015), all of which she pursued as second lady.

“The beauty of (being first lady) is that you can define it however you want,” she told Vogue in July 2019. “And that’s what I did as second lady — I defined that role the way I wanted it to be. I would still work on all the same issues.”

But first lady is a higher-level job in terms of attention and pressure. Can she really do it all?

“I would love to. If we get to the White House, I’m going to continue to teach,” she said in an interview with “CBS Sunday Morning” in August. “I want people to value teachers and know their con-

USA TODAY SPECIAL EDITION

The First Lady • Jill Biden

The Bidens share a moment in Dubuque, Iowa, on Jan. 3, 2008. Joe Biden quit the race after finishing fifth in the Iowa caucuses that day but later became Barack Obama’s running mate. MARK HIRSCH/AP

tributions and to lift up the profession.”

She took a leave of absence from teaching this year as she campaigned for her husband.

“He’s always supported my career,” she told CNN in January. “And this is a critical time for me to support him because, you know, I want change.”

She has strongly defended her husband and family. When asked about the personal attacks by Trump and his media allies on son Hunter Biden, 50, she told “The View” hosts that their tactics were mere “distractions.”

A career in education

Biden, 69, has a bachelor’s degree, two master’s degrees and a doctorate of education from the University of Delaware, which she earned in 2007 under her maiden name, Jill Jacobs.

Biden was the first vice-presidential spouse to have a paying non-political, non-legal, outsidethe-Beltway job while serving. Her predecessor in the role, Lynne Cheney, worked, too (and still works), as a senior fellow at a Washington think tank, the American Enterprise Institute. Karen Pence, wife of Mike Pence, Donald Trump’s vice president, also teaches.

Biden signaled how much she values her career as an educator when she gave her national convention speech remotely this summer. She delivered it while standing in the empty classroom where she taught English at Brandywine High School in Wilminton, Delaware, the early 1990s. “Teaching is not what I do. It’s who I am,” Biden said.

“She has said on the campaign trail she has every intention of doing it,” says Kate Andersen Brower, a journalist and author of the book “First Women,” about modern first ladies.

Joe Biden with sons Beau, left, and Hunter and future wife Jill in the mid-1970s. Jill “gave me back my life” after the death of his first wife, Joe Biden wrote in his 2007 memoir. AFP/GETTY IMAGES

But another first-lady expert, Betty Boyd Caroli, author of multiple White House-related books, including “First Ladies,” has her doubts about whether it’s feasible.

“Eleanor Roosevelt thought she could combine the two jobs but soon found out she could not, and the job of FLOTUS has grown a lot since she left the White House” in 1945,” Caroli says. (FLOTUS is an abbreviation for “first lady of the United States.”)

Biden has the experience to make a good try. She’s hardly the first second lady to move up to first lady (the most recent was Barbara Bush), but she has the advantage of bonding and working closely with “her” first lady, Michelle Obama.

“Jill Biden gives every indication she will be a very activist FLOTUS, following the example of Lady Bird Johnson and others; she’s been thinking about it for a long time,” Caroli says.

“That is to make Americans feel proud of their first lady as someone who is in some way a reflection of their lives and values,” Biden has said of the role of a presidential spouse. “She should respond to the interests and concerns of today’s American women, who are mothers, spouses and wage earners and struggling to balance all three. I think they will identify with a first lady who also is trying to balance all three roles.”

McBride and Andersen Brower say Biden is more prepared to be first lady than most of her recent predecessors, with the exception of Barbara Bush and her daughter-in-law, Laura Bush.

“The amount of time of exposure to this world, eight years (as second lady) plus his (36) years in the U.S. Senate, makes her uniquely equipped to handle the job, and to balance teaching with the opportunity to change people’s lives with this major megaphone,” Andersen Brower says.

McBride says: “I think she will figure out a way to make it work. It’s not without its heavy demands. I think her experience will make it easier to transition to a working (first lady).”

How the Bidens met

Jill Jacobs was born in Hammonton, New Jersey, and raised in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania. She got married after graduating from high school, but she and her first husband, Bill Stevenson, had drifted apart by their junior year at the University of Delaware. They were separated and about to be divorced when she met Joe Biden n 1975.

At the time, Joe Biden was a first-term U.S. senator and a widower. His wife, Neilia, and baby daughter Naomi had died two years earlier in a car accident that left Beau and Hunter injured.

According to the story, the young senator saw Jill’s picture in an ad — she did a little local modeling — and sought her out.

It took five proposals before she agreed to marry him. (She wanted to be sure; she didn’t want Beau and Hunter to lose another mother). The couple married in 1977 and had a daughter, Ashley, in 1981.

They now have five grandchildren, ages 25 to 14.

Both Bidens are devoted to the “Cancer Moonshot” program, launched by President Barack Obama “to end cancer as we know it.” Their interest isn’t just due to Beau’s death at age 46; both of Jill Biden’s parents died of cancer.

So if Biden carries out the role of first lady with the twist of pursuing her career, she has already demonstrated qualities prized for the “traditional” part of the job and for what has long been assumed to be the first lady’s No. 1 responsibility: humanizing her husband and promoting his agenda.

Myra Gutin, a first-lady historian and professor of communication at Rider University in New Jersey, says that a press secretary for former first lady Betty Ford wrote years ago that the first lady can provide a window into the White House.

“From this window, we can develop a sense of the character of the president and his family,” Gutin says. She predicts Biden will use her White House podium to provide those insights and “make life a little better for Americans.”