PhD, Former Second Lady of the United States, Wife with 40 Years of Experience: What We Know About Jill Biden
'17.10.2020'
Source: TASS
If Joe Biden wins the November 3 elections, then for the first time in US history, a professor will become the first lady. TASS tells what is known about the spouse of the presidential candidate and what she intends to do if she becomes the main woman in the country.
In the event of her move to the White House, 69-year-old Jill Biden does not intend to leave her job and is going to continue teaching English at the Community College of Northern Virginia.
“If we get to the White House, I will continue teaching,” she shared her plans with CNBC. I want people to appreciate teachers, to know their contribution to the development of the profession. "
From 1993 to 2017, all the wives of American presidents held degrees. Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton are lawyers, and Laura Bush is a Master of Libraries. But none of them were able to continue their careers while simultaneously performing the role of first lady. Moreover, in the entire 231-year American history, none of their predecessors managed to do this.
According to The Washington Post, only now, for the first time since 1981, Biden has taken a break from her teaching practice to support her husband's election campaign. Even when her husband was vice president (2009–2019) and Jill was the second most important woman in the country, she continued to teach. She also developed community colleges, helped families of military personnel, and participated in a public campaign for breast cancer prevention.
If, in the event of a move to the White House, Biden does indeed pursue her career, this will greatly distinguish her from the wives of former American leaders.
Free work
According to the tradition that has developed in the United States, the main task of the first lady is to help her husband maintain the image of an exemplary family man. When they appear in public with their wives, politicians, as a rule, try to show their other, more human side, which will certainly benefit their ratings.
The First Lady accompanies the President on business trips abroad, at official meetings and ceremonies, and even at political rallies. Women not only constantly travel with their presidential spouses, but also organize festive receptions, parties in the White House, choose the menu for dinner parties, determine the seating of guests, and participate in various social and charitable events.
Although such work takes a lot of time and requires certain diplomatic skills, officially it is not paid in any way.
The role of the first lady is not enshrined in the constitution, she does not have clearly defined official duties. In fact, she does everything for free and can hardly refuse it. As we can see from the example of the Biden couple, the work of the first lady begins long before the vote, at the start of the election campaign.
Thus, Eleanor Roosevelt went down in US history as the first lady activist who advocated the empowerment of women and African Americans. She gave press briefings and wrote columns for magazines.
After moving to the White House, Hillary Clinton moved her office to the West Wing (where the Oval Office is located) and was actively involved in political decision-making. Thanks to the experience gained, she became the only first lady who managed to run twice for president. According to Clinton herself, it was she who convinced her husband to nominate the recently deceased Ruth Ginsburg to the Supreme Court in 1993.
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Michelle Obama has also become a kind of innovator. First of all, because she turned out to be the only African-American first lady in history. Obama said that from the very beginning of her tenure in the White House, she knew that she would be judged by "different standards."
Unlike Clinton, she chose to stay away from politics, but focused on community service, primarily promoting education.
It is impossible not to mention the current first lady - Melania Trump, who will be remembered as the most rebellious spouse. She did not want to move to the White House immediately after her husband, in public she refused to hold his hand, and, according to a telephone conversation with her, allegedly, she was not delighted with the obligation to decorate the White House for the holidays. In addition, Melania expressed dissatisfaction with the president's policy of separating migrant families on the border with Mexico and refused to travel with him to official events.
Potential first lady
Jill Biden (Jacobs is her maiden name) was born in 1951 in New Jersey to the family of a bank clerk and a housewife. The eldest of five sisters, she grew up in Willow Grove, a suburb of Philadelphia. Biden holds a bachelor's and two master's degrees and received her Ph.D. in education from the University of Delaware in 2007.
Prior to moving to Washington, Jill taught at community college in Delaware, public high school, and adolescent mental hospital. Prior to her marriage to Biden, she was married to former soccer player Bill Stevenson.
When Biden lost his first wife and one-year-old daughter in a car accident in 1972, he single-handedly raised his surviving sons, Bo and Hunter. According to Jill, she met Biden on a blind date three years after the tragedy, in 1975. Then he served as Senator from Delaware, while she was still in college.
In various interviews, the couple said that Joe Biden proposed to Jill five times, but she kept postponing the answer until later. As a result, the couple got married in 1977, in 1981 they had a daughter, Ashley. In 2015, Biden's eldest son Bo died of brain cancer at the age of 46.
The Biden couple have been married for over 40 years, and Jill Biden went hand in hand with her husband the most important stages of his political career. At the same time, she always tried to separate her professional life from big politics. According to Biden, it is important for her to have her own purpose in life for mental well-being.
“A teacher is not a job, but my calling,” she wrote on Twitter.
As stated in the article about Biden in Vogue magazine, she received her doctorate under her maiden name Jacobs. Later, when Joe Biden was already serving as vice president, she continued to teach students as an employee. Her bodyguards specifically wore casual clothes in college so as not to attract undue attention to the person of Biden and not to embarrass students. Judging by her own words, as the first lady, Biden is likely to continue the course of Michelle Obama.
“Education will be a priority - and military families. I would travel all over the country developing free community colleges, ”she says, adding that she will prioritize early childhood education and kindergartens. We need good reading programs and we need equity in schools. We are competing in this global market and the position of the United States must improve. ”
Jill wrote a children's book for military families, Don't Forget God Bless Our Troops, published in June 2012. This work was inspired by her granddaughter Natalie, whose father Bo once served in Iraq. Jill in an interview with The Washigton Post admitted that she was not too worried about politics before the start of the war in Iraq.
“I literally wore black for a week (after George W. Bush's 2004 election victory). I just could not believe that he won, because I felt that everything was already very bad. I was totally against the war in Iraq. And Joe said: you have to change it, you have to change it, ”the newspaper quotes her as saying.
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“How to reconcile a family that has quarreled? She asked in her address to the Democratic Party convention, where her husband was officially nominated as a presidential candidate last August. - Just like a whole nation. Through love and understanding, with courage and unshakable faith. "
If Jill Biden nevertheless moves to the White House and at the same time continues to pursue a career, she is unlikely to be able to accompany her husband all the time at meetings and on foreign trips. On the other hand, this may be a watershed moment after which American society will be forced to rethink the framework in which the most prominent woman in the country is traditionally found.
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