Jill Biden Talks to Harper’s Bazaar 2022.Photo: Cass Bird/Harper’s Bazaar
Dr.Jill Bidenis honored to be first lady of the United States — but she still recognizes the importance of work.
“I understand a woman’s need to have something for herself,” Dr. Biden, 70,tellsHarper’s Bazaarfor the magazine’s latest cover story.
Much of her focus on independence, she tellsBazaar, stems from her first divorce.
In 1970, the now first lady married former college football player Bill Stevenson, taking the name Jill Stevenson. While the two met in college (both attended the University of Delaware), Bill eventually dropped out, and the marriage dissolved.
Jill Biden Talks to Harper’s Bazaar 2022.Cass Bird/Harper’s Bazaar
By her mid-20s, Biden tellsBazaar, she was divorced and on her own.
“I believed so much in the institution of marriage,” she says. “When the marriage fell apart, I fell hard because of that. And for him to turn out to be who he was …”
Cass Bird/Harper’s Bazaar
“I knew I would never, ever put myself in that position again — where I didn’t feel like I had the finances to be on my own, that I had to get the money through a divorce settlement,” she says. “I drummed that into [my daughter], Ashley: Be independent, be independent. And my granddaughters—you have to be able to stand on your own two feet.”
And stand on her own two feet she has — even after her husband, PresidentJoe Biden, took office in January 2021.
A longtime educator, Dr. Biden has continued to teach while living at the White House. In addition to herduties as first lady, she works as aprofessor of English at Northern Virginia Community College— making herthe only first lady in memoryto maintain a paying job outside the White House.
“I am a woman who loves to work,” she tellsBazaar.
She offers up one example of her husband’s response to a “fext” she recently sent in a moment of irritation: “Joe said, ‘You realize that’s going to go down in history. There will be a record of that,'” adding: “I won’t tell you what I called him that time.”
Elsewhere in the story — written as part of the publication’s first cover featuring a first lady in its 155-year history — Dr. Biden opens up about finding personal time where she can, tellingBazaarshe takes barre classes, grades exams before bed and has dinner with her husband whenever time allows.
She also finds quiet and alone time in the first few moments of the day, waking up at sunrise to look out to the White House grounds.
“The first thing I do is open the blinds and look out.”
source: people.com
