When Pregnancy Is the Only Time a Woman Is Treated as Powerful

Pregnant women feel empowered to ask for things they’d never dared — but they’re also told what to do more than ever

Lyz Lenz
GEN
Published in
9 min readAug 11, 2020

--

Photo: Wolfgang Kunz/ullstein bild/Getty Images

For many women, pregnancy is an honor — the canonization of a certain type of femininity. Often, it’s the only time society celebrates a woman, besides her wedding…

--

--

Lyz Lenz
GEN
Writer for

Author of God Land. Columnist for the Cedar Rapids Gazette. The book Belabored is forthcoming from Bold Type Books in August of 2020.