page_title: Jill Biden
section_title: Subsequent activities
hierarchical_section_title: Jill Biden / Subsequent activities
caption_attribution_description: Joe Biden and Jill Biden at the Human Rights Campaign National Dinner, Washington, DC USA, September 15, 2018
context_page_description: Jill Tracy Jacobs Biden is an American educator who was second lady of the United States from 2009 to 2017. She is married to Joe Biden, the 47th vice president of the United States, and the Democratic Party's nominee for President of the United States in the 2020 election.
  Born in Hammonton, New Jersey, she grew up in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania. Biden married Joe Biden in 1977, becoming stepmother to his two young sons from his first marriage, Beau and Hunter, whose mother and baby sister died in a car accident in 1972. Joe and Jill Biden have a daughter, Ashley, born in 1981.
  Biden has a bachelor's degree from the University of Delaware, master's degrees from West Chester University and Villanova University, and a doctoral degree from the University of Delaware. She taught English and reading in high schools for thirteen years, and also taught adolescents with emotional disabilities at a psychiatric hospital. From 1993 to 2008, she was an English and writing instructor at Delaware Technical & Community College.
context_section_description: The former second couple launched the Biden Foundation in February 2017, with the purpose of allowing them to pursue the causes they cared most about, including focuses upon preventing violence against women, his moonshot initiative, and her interests in community colleges and military families.  That same month she was named board chair of Save the Children; she said, "I think [their] emphasis on education fits with my life's work."  Her husband was seen as a popular ex-vice president and she received a standing ovation when she was a presenter at the 71st Tony Awards.  
  In June 2017 the couple bought a $2.7 million, off-the-water vacation home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware near Cape Henlopen State Park, where they planned to host members of their extended family.  Their ability to purchase this family property was due in part to deals they signed with Flatiron Books upon leaving office, with Biden contracted to write one and her husband two.  Indeed, by 2019 the couple reported some $15 million in income since leaving the vice presidency, including $700,000 in speaking engagements for her.  The couple also substantially increased their charitable giving during this period.
  Jill Biden continued to teach full-time at NOVA after her husband left office, with a salary of close to $100,000.  She was selected to give the keynote address at a commencement for Milwaukee Area Technical College in May 2017.  She gave the keynote address at a California teachers summit in July 2017, emphasizing the importance of communities supporting their teachers given the emotional and circumstantial stresses they often have to function under.  Then in May 2018, she gave a commencement address at Bishop State Community College in Alabama, telling the graduates that "Maybe like me, life got in the way and it's taken you a lot longer than you expected to get here today. ... Whoever you are, know this, if you can walk across this stage, you can do anything."  In February 2019 she spoke to the graduating class of the Newport News Apprentice School, telling them that she realized many of them were in complicated life situations with multiple responsibilities, and that "Sometimes your day is a jigsaw puzzle that never seems to get completed.... But no matter where life takes you, as of today you are a master of a craft, a shipbuilder and a leader, and no one can take that away from you." 
  In May 2019 her memoir Where the Light Enters: Building a Family, Discovering Myself was published.  The book has little political content, instead focusing on aspects of family.  In it she states that while she is "grateful" to have been second lady, "The role I have always felt most at home in is being 'Dr. B.'" USA Today called it an "often-poignant memoir that charts her journey from a rebellious teen to young divorcee to the second lady of the United States."  Biden did some book signings to help promote the work.
caption: The Bidens at a dinner for the Human Rights Campaign in 2018
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