Jill Biden

Jill Tracy Jacobs Biden (née Jacobs, later Stevenson; born June 3, 1951) is an American educator who served as the First Lady of the United States from 2021 to 2025, as the second wife of Joe Biden, the 46th president of the United States. She was second lady of the United States from 2009 to 2017 when her husband was vice president. From 2009 to 2024 she was a professor of English at Northern Virginia Community College. She was the first First Lady to hold a salaried job during the majority of her husband's tenure and the first to carry on with her professional career outside the White House for the majority of her tenure as first lady.

Born in Hammonton, New Jersey, Jacobs grew up in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania. In 1977, she married Joe Biden, a widower, and became the stepmother of Beau and Hunter. Biden and her husband also have a daughter, Ashley Biden, born in 1981. Biden has a bachelor's degree in English from the University of Delaware and master's degrees in education and English from West Chester University and Villanova University. She returned to the University of Delaware and received a doctoral degree in education. She taught English and reading in high schools for thirteen years and instructed adolescents with emotional disabilities at a psychiatric hospital. Following this, she was an English and writing instructor for fifteen years at Delaware Technical & Community College.

Biden is the founder of the Biden Breast Health Initiative non-profit organization, co-founder of the Book Buddies program, co-founder of the Biden Foundation, is active in Delaware Boots on the Ground, and with Michelle Obama is co-founder of Joining Forces. She has published a memoir and two children's books.

Early life

Jill Tracy Jacobs was born on June 3, 1951, in Hammonton, New Jersey. She is the oldest of five sisters. Her father, Donald Carl Jacobs, was a bank teller and a signalman in the U.S. Navy during World War II who used the G.I. Bill to attend business school and then had a banking career. His family name had been Giacoppo (or a variation of it) before his father and others in the family emigrated from the Sicilian village of Gesso. The name was anglicized to Jacobs about a month after the family arrived in the United States. Her mother, Bonny Jean (née Godfrey) Jacobs, was a homemaker of English and Scottish descent.

As a child, Jacobs lived with her family in Hatboro, Pennsylvania, and moved when she was eight to Mahwah, New Jersey. Her father was the CEO of the Mahwah Savings and Loan Association. In 1961, the Jacobs family moved to Willow Grove, Pennsylvania, a northern suburb of Philadelphia, and Donald became the president and CEO of InterCounty Savings and Loan in the Chestnut Hill neighborhood of Philadelphia. He held the position for twenty years.

Her parents labeled themselves as "agnostic realists" and did not attend church, but she often attended Sunday services at a Presbyterian church with her grandmother. Later, Jacobs independently took membership classes at nearby Abington Presbyterian Church and, at age 16, was confirmed.

Jill Jacobs always intended to have a career. She began working at age 15, which included waitressing in Ocean City, New Jersey. She attended Upper Moreland High School, later describing herself as somewhat rebellious there while enjoying her social life, along with being a prankster. However, Jacobs has recalled always loving being in English class, and classmates have called her a good student. She graduated in 1969.

Education and career, marriages and family

Jacobs enrolled in Brandywine Junior College in Pennsylvania for one semester. She intended to study fashion merchandising but found it unsatisfying. She married Bill Stevenson, a former college football player, in February 1970 taking the name Jill Stevenson. Within a couple of years he opened the Stone Balloon in Newark, Delaware, near the University of Delaware. It became one of the most successful college bars in the nation.

She switched her enrollment to the University of Delaware, becoming a student in its College of Arts and Sciences, declaring English as her major. She took a year off from college and did some modeling for a local agency in Wilmington to supplement her income. She and Stevenson drifted apart and separated in 1974.

She met Senator Joe Biden in March 1975. They met on a blind date set up by his brother Frank, who had known her in college, though Biden had seen her photograph in a local advertisement. Although he was nearly nine years her senior, she was impressed by his appearance and manners, which were more formal than those of the college men she had known. After their first date, she told her mother, "Mom, I finally met a gentleman." Meanwhile, she was going through turbulent divorce proceedings with Stevenson. She petitioned for a half-share in the Stone Balloon club, but the court case ended without its being awarded to her. A civil divorce was granted in May 1975. In 2026, Stevenson would become the subject of national attention after being charged with murdering his wife, 64 year-old Linda Stevenson, who he married after divorcing Biden.

She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in English from the University of Delaware in 1975. She began her career as a substitute teacher for the Wilmington public school system, then taught high school English full-time for a year at St. Mark's High School in Wilmington. Around this time she spent five months working in Biden's Senate office; this included weekly trips with the senator's mobile outreach operation to the southern portions of the state.

Jill and Joe Biden were married on June 17, 1977, at the Chapel at the United Nations in New York City. The wedding was described afterward by Joseph Sr. as "a very private affair" that was officiated by a Jesuit priest. The wedding occurred four-and-a-half years after the deaths of Biden's first wife, Neilia Hunter Biden, and his infant daughter, Naomi Christina Biden, in a motor vehicle accident. Joe Biden proposed marriage to Jill several times before she accepted, as she was wary of entering the public spotlight, anxious to remain focused on her own career, and initially hesitant to take on the commitment of raising of his two young sons. The Bidens spent their honeymoon at Lake Balaton in the Hungarian People's Republic. Jill Biden raised Beau and Hunter, and they called her Mom, but she did not formally adopt them.

Jill Biden continued to teach while working on a master's degree at West Chester State College, taking one course per semester. She graduated with a Master of Education degree, with a specialty in reading from West Chester in 1981. The Bidens' daughter, Ashley Blazer Biden, was born on June 8, 1981, and Jill stopped working for two years while raising the three children.

Biden then returned to work, teaching English, acting as a reading specialist, and teaching history to emotionally disabled students. She taught in the adolescent program at the Rockford Center psychiatric hospital for five years in the 1980s. Biden received her second graduate degree, a Master of Arts in English from Villanova University, in 1987. She was not considered a political person at the time, and during her husband's unsuccessful bid for the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination, she said she would continue her job of teaching emotionally disabled children even if she became the first lady. She taught for three years at Claymont High School. In the early 1990s, she taught English at Brandywine High School in Wilmington; several of her students there later recalled her as genuinely caring about them. In all, she spent thirteen years teaching in public high school.

From 1993 through 2008, Biden was an instructor in English at the Stanton campus of Delaware Technical & Community College. There she taught English composition and remedial writing, with an emphasis on instilling confidence in students. She has said of teaching at a community college, "I feel like I can make a greater difference in their lives. I just love that population. It just feels really comfortable to me. I love the women who are coming back to school and getting their degrees, because they're so focused."

Biden is president of the Biden Breast Health Initiative, a nonprofit organization begun in 1993 that provides educational breast health awareness programs free of charge to schools and other groups in the state of Delaware. She began the effort after four of her friends were diagnosed with breast cancer that year. In the following 15 years, the organization informed more than 7,000 high school girls about proper breast health. In 2007, Biden helped found Book Buddies, which provides books for low-income children, and has been very active in Delaware Boots on the Ground, an organization that supports military families. She runs five miles, five times a week, and she has run in the Marine Corps Marathon as well as the Philadelphia Half Marathon.

Biden later returned to school for her doctoral degree, studying under her birth name, Jill Jacobs. In January 2007, at age 55, she received a Doctor of Education (Ed.D.) in educational leadership from the University of Delaware. Her dissertation, Student Retention at the Community College: Meeting Students' Needs, was published under the name Jill Jacobs-Biden.