“It doesn’t hurt, I promise.” Jill Biden’s words of reassurance were offered to a woman at a vaccination clinic in New Mexico. “Normally I’m scared of them! Let me tell you, it’s so fast. Are you a little scared?”
When the woman nodded yes, the masked first lady walked across the room to stand with her. And when the woman averted her eyes from the needle, Jill consoled: “I can’t look either. Just look at me. It doesn’t hurt. Really.”
Jill was kicking off a three-day tour of the south-west to push the White House goal of addressing coronavirus vaccine hesitancy. Yet on Thursday, before visiting the country’s biggest Native American reservation, the Navajo Nation, she still found time to teach – via Zoom – her English composition class at a community college near Washington.
The trip generated few headlines or controversies, much like the rest of her first hundred days as presidential spouse. But in her understated way, Jill has been redefining the role as a working woman unafraid to take on political causes.
She has already made history as the first first lady to hold a paid job outside the White House, working as an English professor at Northern Virginia Community College (Nova). She has travelled the country to champion Joe Biden’s policy agenda. She has also triggered headlines with her fashion choices such as CNN’s “Jill Biden is rocking a new look for first ladies”.
Yet the 69-year-old grandmother has done most of it under the radar, generating less heated emotions or morbid fascination than predecessors such as Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama and Melania Trump. Instead she has mirrored her husband’s ability to cool the political temperature.
“She’s actually been pretty low-key, it seems to me,” said Monika McDermott, a political science professor at Fordham University in New York. “She is abiding by standard first lady early on protocol, which is just to provide support but not necessarily be really out there. She’s not taking on the aggressive Hillary Clinton model which was, we know, horribly unpopular.”
With eight years as second lady and decades in public life, Jill is arguably the best-prepared first lady in history.
She grew up just outside Philadelphia and began teaching English at a high school in Wilmington, Delaware, in 1976. She married then-senator Biden in New York the following year and became the mother of his two sons, Beau and Hunter. Their daughter, Ashley, was born in 1981.
In 2007 she received doctorate in educational leadership from the University of Delaware. During Biden’s eight years as vice-president, she combined her duties as second lady with teaching at Nova. She has said: “Teaching isn’t just what I do, it’s who I am.”
Jill was an active surrogate during Biden’s presidential election campaign and as first lady has, as expected, advocated for community colleges, military families and efforts to fight cancer. But she has also travelled to states such as Alabama and New Hampshire to promote her husband’s $1.9tn coronavirus relief package, which passed Congress without any Republican votes.
Anita McBride, a fellow in residence at American University in Washington and former chief of staff to the ex-first lady Laura Bush, said: “She doesn’t mind wading into politics, that’s for sure, and I think during the campaign she was very strong and very direct in her language about the difference between her husband’s character and Donald Trump’s.
“She was an effective campaigner for him beyond the traditional role of a spouse being out there to do events, to help raise money, to help talk about your personal life with the candidate, what kind of family person they are.”
But years of experience have also shown Jill the official and unofficial limits of her new role. While she is clearly more engaged with policy than Melania Trump, she has stopped short of emulating Clinton, who was tapped by husband Bill to lead a taskforce on health reform and had her own office in the West Wing.
Kate Andersen Brower, author of First Women: The Grace and Power of America’s Modern First Ladies, said: “She sees herself as a healer in chief. She is touting some of the administration’s policies but she’s not taking on very controversial issues. She’s talking about the vaccine, she’s talking about community college and how it should be free in her opinion, but I haven’t seen her talk a lot about gun control or immigration.”
Brower took part in an off-the-record call with Jill and a few other journalists a couple of months ago. “Generally she talked – and she said this publicly – about wanting to be this source of compassion and empathy for people, especially working mothers during the pandemic.
“She has done a good job of exuding the kind of compassion that we have been missing over the last four years but I don’t think we’ve seen as much of her as I thought we would. Part of that is the pandemic, but also she’s teaching and that’s a balancing act, a difficult needle to thread.”
This might partly explain why Jill has not elicited the same visceral backlash as the two women who came before her. She has avoided the kind of gaffes that would make her a lightning rod for rightwing criticism. When in December an opinion column in the Wall Street Journal called for her to drop the title “Dr”, it was widely condemned as a sexist attack.
Jill is known as “Dr B” to her students at Nova, where she continues to teach remotely during the pandemic. Jimmie McClellan, the dean of liberal arts at the college and her supervisor, said: “We still see her as a colleague as opposed to whatever hat she may wear when she’s not on campus.
“That’s the way she prefers it because she wants to separate these two parts of her life. She has her career and her husband has his career and she’s not really defined by her husband’s career, but by her own. She’s a professor of English and she earned the title of doctor and she uses it, as do I.”
Moving to the most famous address in America hasn’t changed her, McClellan added. “She didn’t change when she became second lady. She didn’t change when she wasn’t second lady any more and she hasn’t changed now. She’s still a dedicated teacher.”
