Jill Biden’s journey from ‘secret weapon’ to ‘radical’ first lady

It was an icy afternoon in Davenport, Iowa, and Dr Jill Biden was knocking on doors with a rare energy. It was not as though she was pestering people; if residents did not want to chat, she wished them a good day and left. If there was no answer, she popped a flier under the door.

When she did engage with people, she was warm but not gushing. And it was clear she very much believed in the product she was selling, namely the presidential candidacy of her husband, Joe Biden.

“I have heard this all over Iowa and New Hampshire. We need someone we can respect – a leader,” she told The Independent that day in February 2020, days before the Iowa caucuses, the first and often crucial contest in the primary season. “People are positive. They say they’re going to vote for my husband because we need a change.”

As it was, Joe Biden took a political beating in that heartland showdown, coming in fourth behind Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg, and Elizabeth Warren. In New Hampshire, he came in fifth. In Nevada he was second, seemingly unable to dent Sanders’s momentum.

Many people started to question the viability of Biden’s candidacy, particularly his assertion that he was most favoured not just to defeat just his rival Democrats, but Donald Trump too. Jill Biden was apparently not among them. As everyone now knows, Biden’s campaign did not end in those anxious early months of spring. Rather, a stunning win in South Carolina jump-started his candidacy, pushing him to further wins on Super Tuesday and beyond.

“This is just the beginning,” Jill Biden told CNN after her husband’s win in South Carolina, something helped hugely by the endorsement of African American congressman James Clyburn. “I'm a marathon runner. This is just the beginning of our marathon. I think we're going to take it the whole way.”

Now, a year after having been deployed as her husband’s best known “secret weapon”, Biden is set for a new role, that of first lady of the United States. On Wednesday 20 January, when Joe Biden, 78, is sworn in as the nation’s 46th president, Jill Biden will become America’s first lady, a position that has no constitutional duties, but is weighted with challenges and expectations.

Michelle Obama, who like Clinton was also a lawyer, endured racist abuse, comments about her body shape, and intense scrutiny of every outfit she wore. She tried to deflect the hurt, saying: “When someone is cruel or acts like a bully, you don’t stoop to their level. No, our motto is ‘When they go low, we go high’.”

The most recent first lady, Melania Trump, also faced criticism – for not immediately moving from New York into the White House, for allegedly being too “aloof” and “cold”. Lots of people attacked her for not standing up to her husband and denouncing his policies. People commented on her shoes, or at least questioned whether they were appropriate for walking across the South Lawn of the White House.

On paper, Jill Biden, 69, will step into the job with several advantages that some of her predecessors did not have. She will not face racist abuse, and she has shown from the time spent on the campaign trail that she wishes to be part of her husband’s team, even if she does not get down in the weeds on policy issues.

Two other things make it likely she will step into the role, if not with utter ease, then with some degree of comfort. One is that she has already done a version of it before. For the eight years Joe Biden spent as Barack Obama’s vice president, so she was second lady, in the front row of the action, if not under the persistent ark lighting scrutiny that Obama and his wife endured. It allowed her to pick up plenty of tips.

“I'm so fortunate to have gotten to know [Dr Biden] while we were in the White House,” Michelle Obama wrote in an Instagram post ahead of the 2020 election. “She was my partner-in-crime.”

She added: “Jill is one of the most grounded people you’ll ever meet, inside or outside of politics. She’s just a breath of fresh air without an ounce of pretence.”

The second thing that will be both a challenge and a shield is that she intends to continue her job, teaching english and writing, at the Northern Virginia Community College, located about 20 miles west of the White House in Annandale. More than 230 years after Martha Washington, wife of George Washington, became the very first first lady in 1789, Jill Biden will be the only one of all the women who preceded her, to hold down a day job.

Politico said while she was second lady she would frequently take a cocktail dress or evening wear to change into at the college, before racing to the White House or the vice president’s residence at the Naval Observatory, for an evening reception.

It said she marked or graded papers in the evening, either perched on her seat on Air Force Two, or backstage waiting to speak at an event. At the community college, where she has the nickname “Dr B”, her Secret Service protection officers have sought to dress like college students.

“Most nights we had receptions so I would come home from school and I would take a half an hour down, and sometimes I would just be flat on my back on the bed getting my head together,” she told Vogue, in 2019. “And then I’d get up and go downstairs and do a receiving line.”

The attempt at normality will not be without its challenges, not least how to manage her time.

“Just being herself and very much adopting and projecting this image of a professional educator, that is radical for a first lady,” says Katherine Jellison, professor of history at Ohio State.

“Because she is really presenting an image of someone whose identity is primarily that of a professional educator who just happens to be married to the president of the United States. That's something very new and different for a first spouse, to have such a strong identify with a particular professional calling, and for that to be primarily who she is – not the first lady, but a community college professor.”

Jellison says it is likely Biden will face some criticism. Indeed, she already has.

Last year, after Joe Biden’s win, an article published in the Wall Street Journal by veteran essayist Joseph Epstein, said by his critics to be misogynistic, accused the first lady-in-waiting of being “fraudulent, not to say a touch comic”, for demanding people address her as Dr Biden.

“Your degree is, I believe, an EdD, a doctor of education, earned at the University of Delaware through a dissertation with the unpromising title Student Retention at the Community College Level: Meeting Students’ Needs,” he wrote. “A wise man once said that no one should call himself doctor unless he has delivered a child. Think about it, Dr Jill, and forthwith drop the doc.”

The reaction to Epstein’s article from her friends and supporters was immediate.

“For eight years, I saw Dr Jill Biden do what a lot of professional women do – successfully manage more than one responsibility at a time, from her teaching duties to her official obligations in the White House to her roles as a mother, wife, and friend,“ Michelle Obama said. “And right now, we’re all seeing what also happens to so many professional women, whether their titles are Dr, Ms, Mrs, or even First Lady: all too often, our accomplishments are met with skepticism, even derision.”

Joe Biden tweeted: “Together, we will build a world where the accomplishments of our daughters will be celebrated, rather than diminished.”

As it is, Jill Biden has four university degrees. Jellison says it is hard to attack an educator, especially someone who teaches as a community college. “Who can be against education, and it's an education not at an elite institution, but at the antithesis of an elite institution, a community college,” she adds.

Biden was born Jill Tracy Jacobs, in Hammonton, New Jersey, the eldest of five sisters. Her father was a bank teller. After completing high school, she made her way to the University of Delaware where at the age of 18 she married Bill Stevenson, a college football player. Their marriage lasted five years.

She met Joe Biden in 1975, on a blind date arranged by his brother. At that point, Biden was already a senator and nine years older than her. His wife, Neilia, and one-year-old daughter Naomi, had been killed three years earlier in a traffic accident. He was raising two sons, Beau and Hunter, travelling every day to DC from Wilmington, Delaware, to see the boys.

In her 2019 memoir, Where the Light Enters: Building a Family, Discovering Myself,  she writes about how she and Biden work to pull through following the 2015 death of Beau, after he developed a rare brain tumour.

She also wrote about her first date in Philadelphia, with the man who would become her second husband, recalling that her first words to him when he called her, were: “How did you get this number?”

In an interview with the Philadelphia Inquirer, she said she did not immediately realise they would be together for the next 40 years. They married in 1977. “It was kind of a blind date that we went on, and I didn’t really think I’d … I thought, ‘OK, I’ll go out with him once and that’ll be it’,” she said.

Biden, who has five grandchildren and who calls Prince Harry a friend, will be taking with her their dog, Major, who was “adopted” from an animal shelter in Delaware. She has also named a team, who will follow her into the White House, including Michael LaRosa, who served as her press secretary during the the 2020 campaign.

She also indicated she plans to continue the programme to help military veterans and their families, a project she worked on with Michelle Obama. She said the office of the first lady, often called the East Wing in contrast to the office of the president in the West Wing, would seek to build “an administration that lifts up all Americans”.

She added: “Together, we will work to open the White House in new, inclusive and innovative ways, reflecting more fully the distinct beauty of all our communities, cultures and traditions.”