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>Dr. Jill Biden
Education and career, marriages and family
Jacobs enrolled in Brandywine Junior College in Pennsylvania for one semester.[13] She had the intent of studying fashion merchandising, but found it unsatisfying.[6] She married Bill Stevenson, a former college football player, in February 1970;[14] she became known as Jill Stevenson.[15] Within a couple of years, he opened the Stone Balloon in Newark, Delaware, near the University of Delaware.[14] It became one of the most successful college bars in the nation with many name musical artists performing there.[14]
She switched her enrollment to the University of Delaware,[13] where she declared English as her major.[6] She then took a year off from college and did some modelling work for a local agency in Wilmington.[6] She and Stevenson drifted apart;[14] they became separated during 1974.[16]
She met Senator Joe Biden in March 1975.[10][13] They met on a blind date set up by Joe's brother Frank,[13] though Biden had seen her photograph in a local advertisement.[10] Although he was nine years her senior, she was impressed by his more formal appearance and manners compared to the college men she had known, and after their first date she told her mother, "Mom, I finally met a gentleman."[6] Meanwhile, she was going through turbulent divorce proceedings with Stevenson; the court case ended with her not getting the half-share in the Stone Balloon she had wanted.[14] A civil divorce was granted with immediate effect in May 1975.[15]
Joe and Jill, soon after meeting in the 1970s
She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Delaware in 1975[17][18] (some sources give this as 1974).[13] She began her career being employed as a substitute teacher in the Wilmington school system, then taught high school English full-time for a year at St. Mark's High School in Wilmington.[13][10] Around this time she spent five months working in Biden's Senate office;[19] this included weekly trips with the senator's mobile outreach operation to the southern portions of the state.[13]
She and Joe Biden were married by a Catholic priest on June 17, 1977, at the Chapel at the United Nations in New York City.[2][10][20] This was four and a half years after his first wife and infant daughter died in a motor vehicle accident;[2] Joe had proposed several times before she accepted, as she was wary of entering the public spotlight, anxious to remain focused on her own career, and hesitant to take on the commitment of raising his two young sons who had survived the accident.[6][9]
She continued to teach and worked on a master's degree at West Chester State College, taking one course per semester.[13] This was completed when, while pregnant, she received a Master of Education with a specialty in reading from West Chester in 1981.[6][17][21] The Bidens' daughter Ashley Blazer was born on June 8, 1981,[22] and Jill stopped working for two years while raising the three children.[23]
She then returned to work, teaching English, acting as a reading specialist, and teaching history to emotionally disturbed students.[10] She taught in the adolescent program at the Rockford Center psychiatric hospital for five years in the 1980s.[2][6] In 1987, Biden received her second graduate degree, this one a Master of Arts in English from Villanova University.[2][17] 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.[24] In all, she spent thirteen years teaching in public high school,[10] including three years at Claymont High School.[6]