Prof FLOTUS

Jill Biden, first full-time employed US First Lady

by Sajitha Premathunga

There’s a lot of pressure on FLOTUS, specially since she has to live up to a 231-year tradition and measure up to the legacies of former First Ladies, the likes of Jacqueline Kennedy and Michelle Obama. This might not prove to be difficult for a first lady with four degrees; Bachelor of Arts, in English, from the University of Delaware in 1975; Master of Education from West Chester State College in 1981; Master of Arts in English from Villanova University, in 1987 and doctoral degree in education from the University of Delaware in 2007.

Breaking tradition, Jill will be doing double duty as FLOTUS and college English professor, after Joe Biden is sworn in, while also being actively involved in education policy. According to first-lady historian, professor at Ohio University, Katherine Jellison, quoted in USA Today, no previous FLOTUS has been ‘allowed’ to be like most modern American women, with both a work life and a family life. This is not the first time she had broken tradition, Jill was the first person to hold a non-political, non-legal, outside-the-Beltway job while serving as the second lady. She taught at Northern Virginia Community College during her husband’s tenure as vice president for Obama. She famously asked her Secret Service security detail to dress like students and carry laptops in order to blend in.

In fact, she delivered her national convention speech while standing in the empty classroom where she taught English at Delaware’s Brandywine High School in the early 1990s. Her illustrious teaching career, in which she taught at a community college, at a public high school and even at a psychiatric hospital for adolescents, is evidence enough for her versatility as an educator. She also served on the education taskforce for the Biden campaign and helped develop policy proposals. “Teaching is not what I do. It’s who I am,” she is supposed to have tweeted once.

Although Joe Biden had been a US senator for almost four decades and spent two terms as vice president to Barack Obama, Jill had kept a relatively low profile. Although, she made fast friends with Michelle Obama. In fact, Michelle Obama, in a statement to USA Today, has given Jill her personal recommendation saying, “She is going to be a terrific First Lady.”

Philanthropist

Jill worked on the Joining Forces military families project together with Michelle Obama. The programme involved helping military veterans and their families gain access to education and employment resources as well as health and wellness services. Jill was also involved with the nonprofit organization Delaware Boots on the Ground, which helped families whose members have been deployed. Her passion for advocating military families may have been inspired by her exposure as a military family member. Her father, Donald Carl Jacobs, was a US Navy signalman during World War II and Beau was a Major in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps with a year-long stint in Iraq.

Because Jill is an educator, most observe that Education would take top priority in the country’s agenda, along with military families and cancer awareness advocacy, since Joe Biden’s son from his first marriage, Beau, a former attorney general of Delaware and a rising Democratic party member died of brain cancer in 2015 and both Jill Biden’s parents died of cancer. After four of her friends were also diagnosed with breast cancer, she started the Biden Breast Health Initiative in Delaware in 1993, which educated over 10,000 high school girls on the importance of early detection. The Biden Cancer Initiative is an organization that brings together cancer researchers, health care providers, and patients to develop clinical trials, detection, care, and treatment plans. The Bidens are also Honorary Co-Chairs for the Global Race for the Cure in Washington, D.C. The Biden Foundation, co-chaired by the couple is a non-profit that champions causes such as support for military families, advancement in community colleges and support for LGBTQ equality.

In other philanthropic work, Jill has played an active but under the radar, role in advocating of girls’ and women’s rights and welfare in Zambia, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Sierra Leone and also focused on women’s educational opportunities in a tour of Asia that took her to Japan, Korea and Vietnam.

In addition to being an educator and a ‘military mom’, Jill is also a published author. She wrote the children’s book ‘Don’t Forget, God Bless Our Troops’, based on her granddaughter, Natalie’s experience of her father, Beau’s deployment in Iraq. Her ‘Joey: The Story of Joe Biden’, about her husband’s formative years, that laid the groundwork for his political career, is peppered with interesting anecdotes about Joe’s childhood. Older readers will find quite interesting Jill’s 2019 memoir, ‘Where the Light Enters: Building a Family, Discovering Myself’. She also co-founded the Book Buddies program.

Jill is known for her empathy, often keeping in touch with people dealing with personal loss or those undergoing chemo, she had met on the campaign trail. According to White House experts she has demonstrated qualities that would allow her to achieve what’s assumed to be the first lady’s number one goal: humanizing her husband and promoting his agenda.

White House experts opine that she would make a smooth transition, aided by the many years of experience. Their 40-plus years of marriage has exposed her to US politics as no FLOTUS before her. Eight years plus the president-elect’s 36 years in the US Senate, makes her uniquely qualified to handle the job of FLOTUS, says Kate Andersen Brower, author of books about the White House, including ‘First Women’, about modern first ladies, quoted in USA Today. Jill was instrumental in Biden’s race for presidency. “What Jill is best at helping me do is figure out who the people around me would be most compatible with me,” said Bidden in their CBS Sunday Morning profile.

How they met their mother

Born Jill Tracy Jacobs on June 3, 1951 in the state of New Jersey, Jill was the oldest of five sisters and grew up in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania. It is interesting to know that she is not all American, as far as her, Sicilian paternal grandparents are concerned. She is a good sport, literally. Jill Biden is an infamous prankster with a penchant for running. Her daily exercise regime includes a five mile run five days a week, along with weight training for good measure, according to Runner’s World in 2010. Jill finished the 1998 Marine Corps Marathon and has done several half-marathons and 10-mile races, according to Women’s Health magazine.

The Bidens have been married since 1977. As the story goes that Jill had been in the process of getting a divorce from her highschool sweetheart, when she met Joe in 1975. According to reports, Jill used to do a bit of local modeling and Joe, nine years her senior and widowed at the time with two young sons, had seen a picture of her in an advert, of all places, on a bus shelter and became smitten. “…I had been dating guys in jeans and clogs and T-shirts, he came to the door and he had a sport coat and loafers,” she told Vogue about their first meet. “When we came home…he shook my hand good night…I went upstairs and called my mother at 1:00 a.m. and said, ‘Mom, I finally met a gentleman.’”

He was a senator at the time and she was still in college. It was Joe’s sons, Beau and Hunter, at the ages of 7 and 6, respectively, who urged him to marry Jill. It took five proposals from Joe for Jill to accept him.

Joe Biden’s first marriage to Neilia Hunter ended in tragedy, when Neilia and Naomi ‘Amy’ Biden, their one-year-old child, were killed in a car crash in 1972, only days after Joe Biden was first elected to the US Senate. Their two sons, Hunter and Beau, were also seriously injured. The couple had daughter Ashley in 1981 and raised the children in Wilmington, Delaware. As a senator, Joe famously commuted to and from Washington to Wilmington daily so he could spend time with Jill and the children. “She gave me back my life,” Biden said in his 2007 memoir ‘Promises to Keep’. “She made me start to think my family might be whole again.”

She helped put the broken Biden family together, after the death of Joe Biden’s first wife and daughter, when she raised Beau and Hunter as her own. But can she help Biden put together a country broken with racial and political division. “How do you make a broken family whole?” she asked. “The same way you make a nation whole. With love and understanding, and with small acts of kindness. With bravery. With unwavering faith,” she said in one of her campaign videos.