Jill Biden - Education and Career, Marriage and Family

Education and Career, Marriage and Family

Jacobs enrolled in a junior college in Pennsylvania to study fashion merchandising, but soon found it unsatisfying. She married Bill Stevenson, a former college football player, in February 1970. 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 enrolled at the University of Delaware, where she declared English as her major. She then took a year off from college and did some modelling work for a local agency in Wilmington. She and Stevenson drifted apart.

Subsequently, she returned to college and met Senator Joe Biden as a senior at Delaware in March 1975. They met on a blind date set up by Joe's brother, though Biden had seen her photograph in a local advertisement. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Delaware later in 1975. She began her career teaching high school English. Meanwhile, she was going through turbulent divorce proceedings with Stevenson; the court case ended in 1976, with her not getting the half-share in the Stone Balloon she had wanted.

She and Joe Biden were married on June 17, 1977, at the Chapel at the United Nations in New York City. This was four and a half years after his first wife and infant daughter died in a motor vehicle accident; Joe had proposed several times before she accepted, hesitant to take on the commitment of raising his two young sons who survived the accident. She continued to teach and then, while pregnant, received a Master of Education with a specialty in Reading from West Chester University in 1981. The Bidens' daughter Ashley Blazer was born on June 8, 1981, and Jill stopped working for two years while raising the three children.

She then returned to work, teaching English, acting as a reading specialist, and teaching history to emotionally disturbed students. She taught in the adolescent program at the Rockford Center psychiatric hospital for five years in the 1980s. In 1987, Biden received a second Master of Arts degree, this one in English from Villanova University. During her husband's 1988 bid for the Presidency, she said she would continue her job of teaching emotionally disturbed children even if she became First Lady. In all, she spent 13 years teaching in public high school, including 3 years at Claymont High School.

From 1993 through 2008, Biden was an instructor at the Stanton/Wilmington campus of Delaware Technical & Community College, where 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. 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.

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 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.