* Any views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Jill Biden's decision to keep her day job while serving as First Lady will send a powerful message to Americans
Stacy A. Cordery is a professor of history at Iowa State University and the author of four books.
First Lady is an impossible role. Every First Lady stands in a tradition and is ultimately judged by it, but she can also change it. Historians like to count First lady “firsts,” as these are often markers of evolution. Jill Biden—the first First Lady to have earned a non-juris doctoral degree—bids fair to modernize the role in a way familiar to most women: she’s going to keep her day job.
Continuing the community college teaching that she maintained for eight years as Second Lady will send powerful messages to Americans. We will understand how committed Dr. Biden and President-Elect Biden are to her career. We will see the respect he has for her and her choices. She will have a good sense, from having closely observed Michelle Obama, of which tasks can be delegated and where she can carve out the time from the extensive First Lady work load. If anyone can do it, Jill Biden can.
Nevertheless, pulling this off will be difficult. The required security alone would be prohibitive. As First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt reluctantly relinquished her teaching job but worked steadily as a paid, professional journalist and speaker. She found she had to donate her earnings in the face of public disapprobation. That was ninety years ago, but Dr. Biden may face similar criticism for commercializing the White House.
Jill Biden may discover that the position of First Lady provides a unique ability to influence millions instead of twenty or so in her classroom. A four-year sabbatical would allow her to teach Americans about the role, potential, and importance of community colleges specifically and higher education generally.
Even as Dr. Biden plans to make history, she is also no different to her predecessors in several ways. She is not the first First Lady with an advanced degree. She is not the first divorced First Lady. She is not the first First Lady to marry a man with children, nor to have grieved the death of a child. She is not the first First Lady to have served as Second Lady. Her causes—education, military families, and cancer—are not new. Jill Biden identifies strongly as a wife, mother and grandmother, as a sister and a daughter, as is clear from every page of her memoir. This has been true of most First Ladies before her as well.
Coupled with her career commitment, these similarities suggest Dr. Biden will make a highly successful First Lady. The First Lady is expected to represent America to the world and American women to themselves. She is supposed to protect and care for her husband, but also to be his best and most honest (but private) critic. She should be the nation’s hostess and the caretaker of the national treasure that is the White House. She should have one or more causes, and thereby take advantage of her position to improve the nation and its people.
Since the 1960s, Americans have expected the First Lady to campaign on behalf of her husband. She can speak about him in glowing terms that he would not use for himself and suggest charming foibles that might humanize and endear him to the public. Americans do not expect the First Lady to hold major political ideas that oppose her husband’s, although speaking out on issues that matter to her (and ideally to them both) is seen as normal. Travel outside the U.S., with or without the President, as a goodwill ambassador or with a more specific purpose (as Hillary Clinton in Beijing) has become more common since Pat Nixon. Some First Ladies, such as Jacqueline Kennedy, Betty Ford, and Michelle Obama, seem to have a special relationship with the American people that resembles the effect Princess Diana had on large numbers of Britons.
Jill Biden is an experienced political spouse. She is gracious but pugnacious, a devoted wife and mother but committed to her career, beautiful but approachable, and publicly proud of the United States and its institutions. No woman can ever meet every expectation. But Dr. Jill Biden brings what should prove to be a winning combination of time-honored qualities and modern sensibilities which will enable her to realize and build upon the traditions of the role of First Lady.
