Jill Biden biography

Synopsis

Early Life

American second lady Jill Biden was born Jill Tracy Jacobs on June 5, 1951, in Hammonton, New Jersey. She spent the majority of her childhood, however, in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania, with her parents and four younger sisters.

Though she set out to study fashion merchandising at a junior college in Pennsylvania, Biden soon found her studies unsatisfying, and left school. Around the same time, she married Bill Stevenson, a boy she had begun dating in the summer of 1969—the same year she had graduated from high school. The two decided to attend the University of Delaware together, and Biden majored in English. By their junior year, the couple had drifted apart. Biden then took a year off from school, knowing all the while that she would return and finish.

To make extra money during her year off, Biden did a little modeling for a local agency. Then-U.S. Senator Joe Biden saw her picture in an advertisement posted on a bus shelter and became smitten. He sought her out, and the two went on a blind date in the spring of 1975.

Marriage, Family and Career

In 1977, two years after they met, the Bidens were married. Biden helped her husband raise his two sons from a previous marriage, and they had a daughter of their own in 1981. Within two years, Biden was "itching" for more, according to an article in Vogue magazine, and decided to return to school.

While working in a psychiatric hospital—where she taught English to adolescents with emotional disabilities for five years—Biden earned two master's degrees, from Villanova University and West Chester University. She went on to teach for three years at Claymont High School, and then at Delaware Technical and Community College. Biden also earned her doctorate in education from the University of Delaware in January 2007.

Biden has been a professor of English at Northern Virginia Community College since 2009. In 2010, she hosted the first-ever White House Summit on Community Colleges with President Obama, and continues to work on that outreach on behalf of the administration.

With one of her stepsons in the military, Biden became involved with the nonprofit organization Delaware Boots on the Ground, which helps families during times of military deployment. She also wrote a children's book, Don't Forget, God Bless Our Troops, based on her granddaughter's story of a military family's experience with deployment. Additionally, Biden co-founded the Book Buddies program.