Jill Biden: From teacher to US first lady

"For all of you out there across the country, just think of your favourite educator who gave you the confidence to believe in yourself. That's the kind of the first lady... Jill Biden will be," Joe Biden said. But how much do we know about the 46th first lady of the United States of America?

Jill Jacobs was born in June 1951 in the US state of New Jersey. The oldest of five sisters, she grew up in the Philadelphia suburb of Willow Grove.

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 and eventually divorced.

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 modelling for a local agency.

Joe Biden lost his first wife and his one-year-old daughter in a car accident in 1972. (His sons Beau and Hunter both survived the accident.) Jill says she was introduced to Joe through his brother three years later. At the time, he was a senator, while she was still in college.

"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, and I thought: 'God, this is never going to work, not in a million years.'

"He was nine years older than I am! But we went out to see A Man and a Woman at the movie theatre in Philadelphia, and we hit it off," she told Vogue of their first date.

She said Joe proposed to her five times before she accepted.

"I couldn't have them [Joe's children] lose another mother. So I had to be 100% sure," she explained. The couple married in New York City in 1977. Their daughter, Ashley, was born in 1981.

Mrs Biden talked about her family and the struggles they have faced when she endorsed her husband for president at the convention.

"I know that if we entrust this nation to Joe, he will do for your family what he did for ours - bring us together and make us whole, carry us forward in our time of need, keep the promise of America for all of us," she said.

Teaching career

Mrs Biden, 69, has spent decades working as a teacher.

As well as a bachelor's degree, she has two master's degrees and a doctorate of education from the University of Delaware in 2007.

Before moving to Washington DC, she taught at a community college, at a public high school and a psychiatric hospital for adolescents - she gave her address at the Democratic Party's convention this year from her old classroom at Delaware's Brandywine High School, where she taught English from 1991 to 1993.

While her husband served as vice-president, Mrs Biden was a professor of English at Northern Virginia Community College.

"Teaching is not what I do. It's who I am," she tweeted in August.

Politics

Mrs Biden previously held the title of Second Lady while her husband served as vice-president from 2009 to 2017. She has maintained her work as an advocate for military families and has also travelled abroad, having focused on the rights and welfare of girls and women in Zambia, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Sierra Leone.

She has focused on women's educational opportunities in a tour of Asia as well that took her to Japan, Korea and Vietnam and later served as a U.S. representative to announce food aid to Malawi.

During this period, her work included promoting community colleges, advocating for military families and raising awareness about breast cancer prevention.

With one of her stepsons in the military, Biden became involved with the nonprofit organisation Delaware Boots on the Ground, which helps families during times of military deployment. Biden and first lady Michelle Obama also launched Joining Forces, an initiative which has provided educational and employment resources as well as health/wellness services to military personnel and their families.

In 2012, she published a children's book called 'Don't Forget, God, Bless Our Troops' based on her granddaughter's experience of being in a military family.

The Biden family faced tragedy when Joe's son Beau passed away from brain cancer in 2015 at the age of 46. Around this time there was also the question of whether Joe Biden would run for U.S. president. He ultimately decided not to run, with the Democratic Party nomination going to former secretary of state Hillary Clinton.

Jill Biden has been a prominent supporter of her husband during the 2020 campaign, appearing alongside him and holding events and fundraisers.