What jobs did Jill Biden hold during her early career and in the 1970s?
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Executive summary
Jill Biden’s early career in the 1970s was rooted in education: after completing her bachelor’s degree in English in 1975 she worked as a substitute teacher in Wilmington and then taught high‑school English full time, and she also spent a brief stint working in Joe Biden’s Senate office before marrying him in 1977 [1] [2] [3]. Contemporary biographies and institutional timelines consistently describe those years as the start of a lifelong teaching career that later expanded into community college instruction and advanced degrees [4] [2].
1. Early education and pivot from fashion to English
Before launching into classroom work, Jill Tracy Jacobs studied fashion merchandising at junior college but shifted course, returning to college and earning a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Delaware in 1975, a credential that set the stage for her entry into teaching in the mid‑1970s [4] [5].
2. Substitute teacher in Wilmington public schools — the first classroom posts
Her first paid work in education was as a substitute teacher in the Wilmington public school system, a role cited repeatedly as the beginning of her professional life as an educator and a direct precursor to full‑time teaching assignments [1] [6].
3. Full‑time high‑school English teacher at St. Mark’s
Following substitute work, she taught high‑school English full time at St. Mark’s High School in Wilmington for about a year; major biographies and reference entries identify that St. Mark’s posting as her earliest sustained classroom assignment in the 1970s [1] [3].
4. Short assignment in Senator Biden’s office and the personal turn in 1977
Around the same period she spent roughly five months working in Joe Biden’s U.S. Senate office, joining the senator’s mobile outreach operation and traveling to parts of the state as part of constituent work — an experience contemporaneous with their courtship that culminated in marriage on June 17, 1977 [1] [3].
5. Teaching start date and how sources frame “began teaching”
Institutional timelines from the Biden library and other profiles mark 1976 as the year she began teaching, a shorthand that captures the substitute work and the St. Mark’s post as the origin of her classroom career during the mid‑1970s [2] [1]. Different outlets emphasize different early roles — some foreground the substitute teaching, others the full‑time high‑school job — but all place her first classroom work squarely in that mid‑1970s window [1] [6].
6. What the reporting does not definitively say about precise months and employers
Available sources agree on the sequence (junior‑college studies → University of Delaware BA in 1975 → substitute teaching → St. Mark’s full‑time → brief Senate office work → marriage in 1977) but do not provide exhaustive month‑by‑month employment records for every 1970s job; public profiles and institutional biographies summarize her early career rather than publish complete employment rosters [4] [2] [3].
7. Why these early jobs matter to the later narrative
Biographers and institutional histories treat these 1970s roles as formative: the early classroom posts launched a decades‑long career in teaching and informed her later focus on community colleges and educational advocacy, a throughline emphasized in profiles from History, Britannica and the Biden Presidential Library [4] [3] [2]. These same sources also highlight that she continued to pursue graduate degrees while teaching in later years, underscoring that the mid‑1970s jobs were the beginning, not the entirety, of her professional trajectory [4] [7].