A Plague of Pearl Clutching: How clutch the pearls became a lady blogosphere cliché.

[Iterate]

31. The phrase is older than that, and far more varied in its meanings.

Here's one source, citing an early usage:

February 1, 2012
Well, clutch the pearls!
...

Of course people have been literally clutching their pearls in shock or otherwise for a long time. Here, for example, is a citation from a 1910 issue of the Chambers Journal, a weekly magazine that published fiction and nonfiction:

“Without being aware that I had stirred, I found myself close to the table. I drew a gasping breath, and my hand went out without any conscious volition and clutched the pearls.”
http://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2012/02/orient.html

I remember the phrase when growing up and thought little of it. At different times it's also meant "hanging on to ones wealth", or to "grab someones testicles", or "hanging on to a treasured memory", or "fear of robbery". The author you cite, Torie Bosch, is pretty selective in her sources and only mentions the meanings that build on her narrative. She might mention the 1997 article by Amy Loudermilk "Clutching Pearls: Speculations on a Twentieth-Century Suicide" (republished in 2002 in River Teeth), but it wouldn't fit.

I'd like to cite those, and others with links, but I've limited out on viewing those Google books. They are in the top of the books search.

The phrase doesn't appear often enough to be registered by Google's Ngram viewer, which only has sources indexed through 2008 anyway. Some of the other similar phrases mentioned in the thread do appear:

http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=smelling+salts%2Cfainting+couch%2Cuptight%2C&year_start=1800&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=3

By far the bulk of the usage has been in the past 2-3 years. To get to the point I'm trying to make, when meanings and usages shift that quickly, you can't be sure that everyone means the same thing. In fact, you can be pretty sure that they don't all mean the same thing, and should be very wary about deciding that they intend the worst, most misogynistic or homophobic meaning.

This isn't going to last long anyway. The sources which are using it now burn through shallow phrases quickly.