Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton meets with local residents in LeClaire, Iowa. (Photo: Charlie Neibergall/AP)

NORWALK, Iowa – She was a young attorney at one of Little Rock’s most prestigious law firms when she became pregnant, but as Hillary Clinton recounted to a small group of voters here on Wednesday, she didn’t dare tell any of her co-workers. Her firm didn’t offer maternity leave.

“I got pregnant, and nobody said anything to me, and I didn’t say anything to them. We didn’t know what to say to each other. So I walked down the hall going to the conference room or the library or something, and I would see one of the partners coming, and he’d go, ‘Ohhhhhhhh,’ and look away,” Clinton recalled with a chuckle.

Seated around her at a table inside a sterile corner of a fruit wholesale warehouse here in the Des Moines suburbs, six Iowans — four women and two men, handpicked to join Clinton at her second official event as a 2016 presidential candidate — laughed, too, at the image of the pregnant lawyer waddling past her awkward employer.