toomanytrees - "She asserts that these men want women barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen. What I observe is that these women want to stay home with their children when they are young. She asserts that these men think women are dirty, unclean. Where did she get this idea?"
"Barefoot and pregnant", sometimes "barefoot and pregnant and in the kitchen", is an Americanism and fits with JB's repeated, seamless references to US politics, as if the UK is the 51st State, which really grates on me. I think that is why some of the things she says sound off-whack and don't ring true to us in the UK.
Having looked up the origin of the phrase, it could be worse if she were taking her cue from Spain!
How “Barefoot and Pregnant” Became a Dark American Joke
Katherine Jamieson - Slate - 22 Oct 2022
Extracts
"For the past century, “Keep ’em barefoot and pregnant!” has been an old boys’ club joke, a motto, a rallying cry, a wedding toast, a chain of California spas, and now, of course, a meme. Incendiary, tasteless, and provocative, it’s commonplace in American culture. But where did it actually come from?
As I cast about for an answer, I discovered a British proverb that seems to have inspired our own American variant. “Keep her well-shagged and poorly shod and she’ll not wander far,” and adaptations thereof, shows up on hundreds of internet conversation threads, social media posts, novels, and, poignantly, in this punk rock song about domestic violence. As Jonathon Green, author of Green’s Dictionary of Slang, noted in response to my Twitter inquiry about “well-shagged and poorly shod,” it’s almost always prefaced by “the old proverb,” but there’s no evidence of it predating the 20th century.
After I reached out to him with the same question, Tony Thorne, a writer and lexicographer who works as a language consultant at King’s College London, delved into the British databases but couldn’t find a definitive date of origin for the phrase either. However, he also believes that it’s likely the progenitor of our own: “I do suspect that the more vulgar, cold-blooded British version is older, but of course that sort of crude language circulated in more private settings and would have been too outrageous for national newspapers and other respectable sources in the U.K. to quote.” . . .
"In addition to the British “well-shagged” version, other iterations of “barefoot and pregnant” from around the world kept popping up in my research. Originally a tenet of the German Empire, the saying “Kinder, Küche, Kirche” (“Children, Kitchen, Church”) encapsulated the ideal role of the married woman. The slogan was picked up and repurposed by Adolf Hitler, who gave a speech in 1934 declaring that a German woman’s world “is her husband, her family, her children, and her home.”
Could this be why we see the first appearance of “barefoot and pregnant” in the U.S. just a few years later? Was the zeitgeist just ripe enough for an American version to emerge? Leila Rupp, professor of feminist studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and author of Mobilizing Women for War: German and American Propaganda, 1939-1945, agreed that the “connection totally makes sense in terms of timing.” She added, “There was little difference in the two countries on the question of where women belonged, so the idea of keeping women in the home, and pregnant to boot, would have made cultural sense in both contexts.”
I also came across references indicating very similar, or perhaps copycat, sayings in Russian and Polish. In Spain, the common proverb, “la mujer casada, la pierna quebrada y en casa” translates as “a married woman at home with a broken leg,” and is known to have been in use before 1583. Other gems include “mujer que no para en casa, cadena en el pie y las manos en la masa”: “A woman who doesn’t stay home, feet in chains and hands in the dough”; and “la mujer y la oveja, antes que anochezca en casa”: “Women and sheep at home before dark.”
I’m left wondering if this is some kind of worldwide, misogynistic mind-meld, or did all these sayings emerge at different times from one common wellspring? Our folksy American iteration, “Keep ’em barefoot and pregnant!” seems somewhat less upsetting than the mention of chains or the threat of broken limbs, but it’s clearly in the same spirit. One thing is evident: The scheme of keeping women tied to childbearing and housework, by whatever means necessary, is not only a time-tested source of humor and folk “wisdom,” it’s got global appeal.
In 1978, with the women’s movement in full swing, Robert Claiborne, the well-known scholar of the English language, optimistically declared “barefoot and pregnant” a “semi-proverbial recipe for marital happiness … [an example of] male callousness to women—now, happily, all but extinct.”
Full article:
slate.com/human-interest/2022/10/barefoot-and-pregnant-history-origin-of-saying.html
"She (Bindel) asserts that these men think women are dirty, unclean. Where did she get this idea?"
I wonder of this part and parcel of her references to the "religious right" (or words to that effect), again importing US political concepts and applying them to the UK?
There are biblical references to the "uncleanliness" of women, particularly around sex, menstruation and childbirth.
However, this author maintains that this is due to a misreading of the Hebrew that made it into the King James Version of the Bible:
WHAT DOES IT MEAN FOR A WOMAN TO BE “UNCLEAN” IN THE BIBLE?
Heather Farrell
Extract
"When I was writing Walking with the Women of the New Testament I did some research about the Woman with an Issue of Blood. I was interested in knowing what she would have experienced and why she was considered to be unclean. The first thing I learned was that the Hebrew word that is translated as “unclean” in the KJV is the word tuma and it does not mean “dirty” or “contaminated”.
In fact, the word tuma is a complex word that can’t be directly translated into English. The simplest explanation is that it is the “energy of death” that fills the world. It comes from the word tamai which means “spiritually impure”, as in being separated from the presence of God. In fact, according to Jewish teachings tuma is what Adam and Eve brought into the world when they took of the fruit of the Tree of Good and Evil. Tuma is the loss of spiritual power that comes from being distanced from God and being able to die, both physically and spiritually.
A dead body is the highest form of tuma (“uncleanliness”) because as a living person, organized in the image of God, it has the greatest spiritual potential of all God’s creations. When a human
dies their spiritual potential departs and creates a “spiritual vacuum”, and their body becomes tuma. In a similar way, a woman who has given birth is also tuma because when she was pregnant she was filled with potential life and the spiritual power of creation. When her child is born that spiritual power departs and she becomes tuma.
In addition by bringing a new child into the world she has also brought more death, because each child who lives must also one day die.
In a sense each one of us “fell” on the day we were born, leaving the presence of God where we were pure and sinless. When we were born we become subject to the “natural” man and gained the ability to sin, thus distancing us further from God. Perhaps this is also the reason that a woman who gave birth to a girl was considered twice as “unclean” (see Leviticus 12) because each girl born meant more life and thus more death and sin…more tuma.
A man was also considered to be tuma after sexual intercourse because of the loss of potential life contained in each one of the sperm he spilled. In a similar way a woman was considered unclean after menstruation because each egg that she shed had the potential to become a new human life. Each egg inside a woman is filled with divine power, the power to activate and create human life. While the egg remains inside of her its spiritual potential is high. Yet once the egg passes through her body that spiritual potential leaves putting her in a state of tuma."
"Under the law of Moses each person– male, female, young, old– had to atone for their own sins, in order to bring them back into a state of purity or holiness. Yet we know that because of the atonement of Jesus Christ the law of Moses is no longer required. Christ fulfilled the law of Moses and enabled us to become clean from our sins, and from our tuma, by communing and accepting His divine sacrifice. Children are born pure, without the ability to sin (see Moroni 8). Each week we take the sacrament we are becoming clean– re-born– in much the same way that the mikvah made ancient Jews clean from their fallen state, their state of tuma."
". . . the (Jewish) menstrual laws are/were designed to help women recognize the incredible power that is housed within their bodies. I think too often in our culture we see menstruation as something routine, inconvenient, embarrassing, and even shameful. We don’t celebrate when a young woman begins her period or do anything to acknowledge the blood sacrifice that women give each month; a sacrifice that makes all human life on earth possible.
I think that if we as women really understood what incredible power we house within our bodies it would change the way we feel about ourselves. Just think about how incredible it is that every woman was born into the world with hundreds of thousands of eggs laying wait in her body. Then at puberty her power to transform those eggs into another human being becomes activated. From that point on every month, for the next thirty or forty years, she will shed her blood as a constant tribute to the continuation of life. Even if none of those eggs ever become a living human person, her body is a powerhouse of life, creating and sacrificing each month with continual hope. And that isn’t “dirty” or “unclean” in any way… just plain miraculous."
Full article:
www.womeninthescriptures.com/2016/02/what-does-it-mean-for-woman-to-be.html
I don't know if "Biblical uncleanliness" is what JB had in mind, or whether she is correct in asserting that "these men" consider women to be dirty and unclean, for this or any other reason.
It would be interesting to know the answers to both those questions.
Meanwhile, that article by Heather Farrell suggests that a lot of damage has been done to Christian women as a result of a mistranslation and lack of familiarity with Jewish concepts and rituals in the Old Testament.