A common trope for the conservative sophist is to claim that all the miseries of modern life were absent in the Edenic golden past, and therefore a return to living in the manner of our ancestors (eg. women barefoot and pregnant),…[emphasis added]

– LP blogger Mercurius

The claim that conservatives want to keep women ‘barefoot and pregnant’ is a feminist-leftist cliche, but it is a rather puzzling charge. The pregnant part I understand; that it is women’s role to have and raise kids is a reasonable caricature of conservative views. But barefoot? Despite having spent much time in my 20s reading conservatives, I recall no passages on the dangerous properties of women’s footwear. (Indeed, it was the feminists themselves who turned women’s shoes into something of a political issue, and in my student politics days it was lefties who used to wander around barefoot.)

Nor do conservatives typically idealise an ‘Edenic golden age’ before the ‘miseries of modern life’. According to another leftist cliche, they want to take us back to the 1950s, which is well into the period of ‘modern life’. (And indeed it is leftists who who get taken in by ‘noble savage’ stories about an idyllic life before the corrupting materialism of modern life, and condemn conservatives for their lack of sympathy for traditional Aboriginal life, in which women really were barefoot.)

My many books of word and phrase origins fail to help explain ‘barefoot and pregnant’, but Wikipedia suggests that:
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