Joe Biden calls his wife Jill the rock of their family. Photo / Getty Images
Joe Biden calls his wife Jill the rock of their family. Photo / Getty Images
Jill Biden is a 69-year-old mum of three with a Dr to her name, marking just one of her four university degrees.
And when Joe Biden is inaugurated in January, she'll become the first professor First Lady of the United States, Michelle Ruiz writes for Vogue.
She'll be the first First Lady to work outside the White House, carrying on in her career as an English professor at Northern Virginia Community College as well as dedicating herself to causes like cancer research, military families, and free community college.
Jill Biden told Vogue she "likes working".
"Like so many of your readers, I'm a working woman. [Teaching is] my passion. That's what I love doing. That has been my career and really a major focus in my life, so I feel like I could handle it and do everything else that first ladies want to do."
What might seem daunting to many hasn't deterred her. She's already kept up her full-time working responsibilities as the Second Lady during two terms of the Obama administration.
As Joe Biden said in his wife's Democratic National Convention introduction video, "Teaching is not what Jill does. It's who she is."
When Jill Biden is in the White House, Americans won't have to wonder what the First Lady is up to.
She's been teaching for 36 years and has made a career of it - and of caring about people.
She described the current atmosphere in American classrooms as "heavy".
Jill Biden will be the next First Lady of the United States. Photo / AP
"You can hear the anxiety that echoes down empty hallways... The rooms are dark, as the bright young faces that should fill them are now confined to boxes on a computer screen."
If Joe Biden is facing a unity crisis in a divided America, perhaps Jill could help steer the country out of an educational crisis, Ruiz writes.
And she has a fun side. Her granddaughters, who appeared with her at the breakfast table in her DNC introduction video, describe her as a "prankster" - she's been known to pick up a dead snake on one of her runs and then use it to scare one of her family members later on.
Meanwhile, Joe calls her the rock of their family. When they met, he was a young senator and dad to two sons and had lost his first wife and baby girl in a car accident.
"She put us back together," Biden has said. And while putting the country back together might be too tall an order for the couple, with Jill by his side, he can start to make meaningful changes, says Ruiz.
"How do you make a broken family whole?" Jill asked in her DNC speech.
"The same way you make a nation whole: with love and understanding."
