Jill Biden

When Jill Biden became First Lady in January 2021, she kept her job. She continued teaching English and writing at Northern Virginia Community College, grading papers on the road and slipping out of the White House to teach classes. No First Lady before her had held a paid job outside the White House while her husband was president, and she insisted that teaching was who she was.

She was born Jill Tracy Jacobs on June 3, 1951, in Hammonton, New Jersey, at 8:50 in the evening, a time on her birth certificate, the eldest of five daughters. Her Sun, Moon and Mars are all in Gemini, in the sixth house, the sector of duty, service and a working routine. Gemini is the sign of language, learning and teaching, and the sixth house concerns the routine of a working life. Three Gemini placements in the sixth describe someone whose identity is bound up with daily, practical work involving words and ideas, which is exactly what teaching English is.

Saturn in Virgo sits in her ninth house, the area of higher education and advanced learning. Saturn there describes a long, disciplined path through education, often finished later in life. Biden earned two master's degrees and then, in 2007, a doctorate in education from the University of Delaware, at fifty-five, writing her dissertation on keeping students in community colleges.

Sagittarius is her rising sign, which gives a warm, open, sometimes mischievous manner. Biden is known among staff for playing pranks, including once hiding in an overhead bin on Air Force Two to surprise staff.

She grew up in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania. Her first marriage, to Bill Stevenson, ended in divorce. In 1975 Joe Biden's brother Frank set her up on a blind date with the senator, whose first wife and infant daughter had been killed in a car crash three years earlier. Joe proposed five times before she said yes, and she has said she wanted to be sure his sons, Beau and Hunter, would not lose another mother. They married in 1977 at the United Nations chapel in New York, and their daughter, Ashley, was born in 1981.

Venus in Cancer falls in her eighth house of shared resources and deep emotional bonds. Venus in Cancer is protective and devoted, and in the eighth it describes love expressed through loyalty during crisis. The family endured enormous losses, including Beau Biden's death from brain cancer in 2015.

Jupiter in Aries sits in her third house of education and communication, adding energy and enthusiasm to teaching and advocacy. As Second Lady she launched Joining Forces with Michelle Obama to support military families, and she has long campaigned on breast cancer awareness, founding the Biden Breast Health Initiative in 1993.

Neptune in Libra, in her tenth house, describes a public role that idealizes partnership and balance. Through two terms as Second Lady and four years as First Lady, the Gemini planets in the sixth house kept her doing what she loved most: showing up to class.