Jill Biden as first lady: Call her Professor FLOTUS
The first thing to know about America’s next first lady is that Jill Biden – a college English professor with four degrees, including a PH.D. – is going to be a very busy FLOTUS since she plans to keep her day job after moving into the White House.
After all, she continued teaching at Northern Virginia Community College during the eight years she served as second lady.
But Biden will be historic in her own way, or at least that’s her plan: She intends to be the first FLOTUS in the role’s 231-year history to pursue her career and keep a paying job while living in the White House and serving as first lady.
“She will really be bringing the role of first lady into the 21st century,” said first-lady historian Katherine Jellison, a professor at Ohio University, noting no previous FLOTUS has been “allowed” to be like most modern American women, with both a work life and a family life.
“Americans have historically wanted their first ladies to be in the White House and at the president’s side whenever possible,” Jellison said. “Maybe the time has come when Americans will be more accepting of the idea that a president’s wife can simultaneously be a first lady and a working professional.”
“The winds of change are blowing because the country keeps moving; this was bound to happen,” said Anita Mcbride, who was chief of staff to former first lady Laura Bush and assistant to President George W. Bush, and now runs the Legacies of America’s First Ladies Initiative at American University’s School of Public Affairs.
Because of her professional life, you can count on education being at the top of Biden’s first-lady agenda, along with advocating for military families and cancer awareness (son Beau Biden died of brain cancer in 2015), all of which she pursued as second lady.
“The beauty of (being FLOTUS) is that you can define it however you want,” she told Vogue in July 2019. “And that’s what I did as second lady – I defined that role the way I wanted it to be. I would still work on all the same issues. Education would be right up there, and military families. I’d travel all over this country trying to get free community college.”
But first lady is a higher-level job in terms of attention and pressure – can she really do it all?
“I would love to. If we get to the White House, I’m going to continue to teach,” she said in an interview with “CBS Sunday Morning” in August. “I want people to value teachers and know their contributions and to lift up the profession.”
She has strongly defended her husband and family. When asked about President Donald Trump and his conservative media allies’ personal attacks on surviving son, Hunter Biden, 50, she told “The View” hosts their tactics were mere “distractions.”
“I don’t like to see my son attacked, and certainly I don’t like to see my husband attacked, but to me, these are distractions,” she said. “This election is ... about the American people. ... The American people don’t want to hear these smears against my family.”
Biden, 69, has a bachelor’s degree, two master’s degrees and a doctorate of education from the University of Delaware, which she earned in 2007.
“She has said on the campaign trail she has every intention of doing it even if he loses,” said Kate Andersen Brower, author of books about the White House, including “First Women,” about modern first ladies.
At least initially, most of her students were unaware of the full identity of “Dr. Biden” as either a U.S. senator’s wife or as second lady, according to an interview with Vogue in March. She asked Secret Service agents to dress like college students and sit unobtrusively out in the hallway, on laptops, and it worked. As first lady, she’s likely to lose this relative anonymity.
One first-lady expert, Betty Boyd Caroli, author of multiple White Houserelated books, including “First Ladies,” has her doubts. “Eleanor Roosevelt thought she could combine the two jobs but soon found out she could not, and the job of FLOTUS has grown a lot since she left the White House (in 1945),” Caroli said.
Biden has the experience to make a good try.
“Biden has been around Washington longer than any FLOTUS in history, and she should have a full Rolodex of people to help her,” Caroli said. “I expect her to quickly appoint a large, competent staff to develop her projects and do whatever she thinks will add to her husband’s legacy.”
Mcbride and Andersen Brower say Biden is more prepared to be first lady than most of her recent predecessors with the exception of Barbara Bush and her daughter-in-law, Laura Bush.
“The amount of time of exposure to this world, eight years plus his (36) years in the U.S. Senate, makes her uniquely equipped to handle the job, and to balance teaching with the opportunity to change people’s lives with this major megaphone as FLOTUS,” Andersen Brower said.
“She is used to having a good team and staff, a good infrastructure around her so she can carve out a new chapter of this role (of first lady),” Mcbride said. “I think she will figure out a way to make it work – it’s not without its heavy demands. I think her experience will make it easier to transition to a working (FLOTUS).”
Biden, born in Hammonton, New Jersey, and raised in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania, was getting divorced when she met her husband. Their first date was in spring 1975. It took five proposals before she agreed to marry him. The couple married in 1977, and had daughter Ashley in 1981.
When she moved into the vice presidential residence at the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington in 2009, Biden continued to teach.
Myra Gutin, a first-lady historian and professor of communication at Rider University in New Jersey, said that a press secretary for former first lady Betty Ford wrote years ago that a FLOTUS can provide a window into the White House.
“From this window, we can develop a sense of the character of the president and his family,” Gutin says, predicting Biden will use her White House podium to provide those insights and “make life a little better for Americans.”