Jenny Sanford - Marriage

Marriage

From 1984 until 1990, she worked at Lazard Freres & Company, an investment bank based in New York City, eventually becoming a vice president in the firm's mergers and acquisitions group. It was while she was working at Lazard that she met her future husband, Mark Sanford, at a beach party in the Hamptons on Long Island. She later talked about the meeting in an interview with The Post and Courier: "It wasn’t exactly love at first sight. It was more like friendship at first sight."

The couple married in 1989, and eventually had four sons, Marshall, Landon, Bolton, and Blake.

It was not until the couple's second son was born that Mark Sanford announced he would enter politics. She would later tell the The Greenville News, "It was quite a surprise to me. When he told me, I was in the hospital, and we had just delivered our second son. So we had a 15-month-old and a newborn, and he says to me, ‘I’m going to run for Congress.’"

In 1994, she managed her husband's successful campaign for the United States House of Representatives, as well as his successful gubernatorial campaign in 2002.

Sanford also acted as her husband's advisor while he was in Congress. According to the Governor's website, she assisted him daily during his first term as Governor, and co-managed his successful re-election campaign in 2006. In 2005, she launched the Healthy South Carolina Challenge, an initiative to reduce the incidence of chronic preventable disease. She serves on the boards of several non-profits, including the Hollings Cancer Center, the Drayton Hall historical property in Charleston, the Coastal Community Foundation and the Children’s Hospital Advisory Fund.