October 31, 2023 NPR article by Selena Simmons-Duffin

It’s a kind of cutesy little way of saying that someone is pregnant to say they have “a bun in the oven.” That metaphor is really old – it first appears in texts by Hippocrates about 2,000 years ago to describe the process of gestation.

But if you think about that, if you’ve baked bread, the real work of baking bread goes on before you put it in the oven – the proofing the yeast and kneading the dough. That work takes time, it takes skill, it takes effort. Once you put the dough in the oven, all you’re doing is waiting.

So why do we use that metaphor to describe pregnancy? That suggests that the active work has been done, presumably by the man, and then the uterus is just like this incubator that’s growing this thing that was already made. I don’t think most people who use that metaphor are being misogynistic. But I think it actually does come from a deeply misogynistic tradition of thinking about women’s bodies as passive.

Kathleen Crowther