But if Joe Biden is elected, Jill Biden as FLOTUS would be different in one very simple and very fundamental way: She would keep her day job.
“That’s what we’ll have to come to terms with,” Bush said. “Should she have a career during the years her husband is president in addition to serving as first lady?”
The Bidens have been married more than 40 years, and in that time Jill Biden has been a supportive spouse and a sounding board. This is her husband’s third time running for President, in addition to his 36 years in the Senate and eight years serving as Barack Obama’s VP. She has had arguably more time than any of her predecessors to imagine what she would do if she were to become the first lady.
With a position as nebulous as this one, now seems like the perfect time to reimagine it. The role of first lady is not enshrined in the Constitution, and there is absolutely no job description and no salary. Yet there are still time-consuming duties first ladies are expected to perform, like planning Christmas parties and the Easter Egg roll, and helping with seating charts and menu selection for formal dinners.
A job with no description
Between 1993 and 2017, all of the first ladies had advanced degrees. Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton are lawyers, and Laura Bush has a master’s in library science. But none of them maintained a career while in the White House. If Jill Biden continues to work, it will force us to have a national conversation we haven’t seriously had before: We’d need to reconsider the traditional limitations placed on the most visible married woman in the country.
Beginning with Martha Washington, each first lady has had to interpret the expectations, opportunities and limitations of the job herself, capitalizing on her personal strengths to try to define the role.
For Washington, that meant being the presidential hostess, inviting dignitaries and members of Congress to the presidential mansion in Philadelphia because she thought it would help legitimize the new democracy.
By the time Mary Todd Lincoln moved into the White House in 1861, the term “first lady” was ensconced in the American lexicon — showing how much quiet power multiple women had brought to the position over its first 72 years. And yet, the president’s spouse was still expected to only be a hostess, like Washington.
More than meets the eye
In reality, the most popular first ladies have done much more than serve as hostesses; they’ve humanized their husbands on the campaign trail and in office, operating more as diplomats than party planners.
It’s only because we know so little about them that these women often become caricatures, either trivialized or romanticized, and relegated to being adjacent to the political sphere rather than where they actually are: right in the thick of it. In her memoir, Michelle Obama called it a “strange kind of sidecar to the presidency.”
Read More: Professor FLOTUS? How Jill Biden would redefine what it means to be first lady