Dr. Jill Biden: Who Is Joe Biden’s Wife?
Jill Biden is the wife of presidential candidate Joe Biden. She is an educator by trade and served as the second lady of the United States during her husband’s two terms as vice president between 2009 and 2017.
Jill Dedicated Her Life To Education
Jill Tracy Jacobs was born in Hammonton, New Jersey, on June 3, 1951, per Biography. The oldest daughter of a bank teller father and a homemaker mother, she spent the majority of her childhood in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania alongside her four younger sisters. She attended Upper Moreland High School, and upon graduation in 1969, would enroll at Brandywine Junior College to study fashion merchandising. She eventually switched her enrollment to the University of Delaware.
She graduated from the University of Delaware with a bachelor’s degree in English. While working as a teacher in Wilmington, Delaware, she continued her studies, pursuing a master’s degree at West Chester State College. She graduated in 1981 as a Master of Education while pregnant with her daughter Ashley. She would earn another master’s degree in 1987, when she graduated from Villanova University as a Master of Arts in English.
Her education would continue well into her later years, as she returned to the University of Delaware and pursued her doctorate degree. She would graduate as a Doctor of Education in educational leadership in 2007, when she was 55 years old.
Jill’s pursuit of education has run concurrently with her career as an educator. After spending 13 years as a high school teacher teaching English and reading, along with a period working in a psychiatric hospital teaching adolescents with emotional disabilities, she was hired as an English and writing instructor at Delaware Technical & Community College in 1993. She worked at the community college until 2008.
With her Husband’s relocation to Washington, D.C., in 2009, Jill would take a job as a professor of English at the nearby Northern Virginia Community College. This made her the first second lady to hold a paying job while the vice president was serving in the country’s history. She still teaches there today.
Jill Has Been A Strong Supporter Of Various Charitable Causes
Beyond her career, Jill has dedicated herself to a series of charitable causes. In 1993, she founded the Biden Breast Health Initiative, a nonprofit dedicated to providing schools in Delaware educational breast health awareness programs at no charge. The program has educated thousands of young women on proper breast health.
In 2007, she would co-found Book Buddies, an organization that seeks to make books available to children from poorer communities. She has also provided support for Delaware Boots on the Ground and their efforts to provide for military families. She and Michelle Obama would continue their efforts to support military families in 2011 when they co-founded the Joining Forces national initiative.
In 2017, she co-founded the Biden Foundation, which has sought to address causes important to the couple, as reported by CNN. These include violence against women, the cancer moonshot initiative, and support for community colleges and military families.
Jill and Joe were married in 1977 after originally meeting on a blind date in March 1975. The marriage came several years after the tragic death of his first wife Neila and daughter Naomi in a 1972 car accident. She is the stepmother to Hunter and Beau Biden, and the couple had a daughter of their own, Ashley, in 1981.
She was married previously before meeting Joe. In 1970, she married Bill Stevenson, who was a former college football player who would go on to establish a successful college bar in Newark, Delaware. She and Stevenson married young and would eventually grow apart, separating in 1974.
