How did we, as a culture, get the idea that fair-haired women are stupid, superficial and oversexed? How far back does that go? Is it older than Marilyn Monroe’s movies?
It certainly goes back to Anita Loos’ 1925 novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.
http://www2.wwnorton.com/catalog/spring98/gentlemen.htm
The 1953 movie version starred Monroe and she sang the song “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,” establishing for all time her baby doll image. But Carol Channing played the role in the 1949 Broadway play, with music by Jule Styne and Leo Robin. These roles certainly cemented the character into American lore.
There had been both an earlier Broadway play by Loos and a silent film in the 1920s, so the image of the gold-digging but innocent blonde had been around for a generation by then in all media.
Lorelei Lee doesn’t quite summon the image of the pneumatic blonde with sex appeal and no brains. That, I think, may be more a character from Vargas’s 1930’s Esquire drawings as adapted by the GIs and flyboys of WWII. But between these they cover the field pretty well.
In a Previous thread on the subject, I said that I had found an 1878 cite for “a dizzy blond.”
There may be a lot of subconscious stuff going on here.
For what it is worth:
Most lighter Caucasians are fair-haired as children and acquire a darker, chestnut-brown colour as they reach adulthood.
Blonde hair on a woman may therefore be representative of youth, therefore inexperience and foolishness.
Extremely flaxen-haired Caucasian adults (margarine yellow, say) DO exist, but the VAST majority of very light blondes are dye jobs (including Marylin Monroe). So a woman who does something like that to her hair is assumed to be flighty and narcissitic. Not to mention her devotion to keeping it that way.
Intelligent women are assumed to have more to do than dye their hair and spend all that time retouching the roots.
Finally, have you heard about the two blonds on opposite banks of the river? One yells: “How do I get to the other side?”. and the other one answers: " You already are on the other side!" 
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Supposedly, Jayne Mansfield was a highly intelligent woman. She was smart and calculating enough to know that creating a public pesonna that reinforced stereotypes would bring fame and fortune.
That doesn’t mean that she is responsible for creating the stereotype but she certainly furthered it.
It all stems from men’s eternally wishful thinking.
Goldie Hawn probably helped the steriotype on Laugh-In
I believe the stereotype got a big boost when “polack” jokes became no longer acceptable. All the traditional polack jokes got switched over to blonde jokes.
If this page’s data is correct, I’m going to go with 17 Feb, 1981.
As I have remarked to DesertRoomie who is blonde and not dumb, "It has been my experience that it’s not blonde that makes you dumb . . . It’s bleach.
Judging by Jean Harlow’s comic performance in the 1933 version of Dinner at Eight the stereotype was alive and well long before then.
It may interest you to know that the saying, “Blondes have more fun” is true, in a way. People with blonde hair are statistically more fertile than people of other pigmentations.
Can you link to a source for that snippet? One assumes you mean natural blondes.
And now for some more evidence that the stereotype was actually quite broadly realized in the 1870’s, if not before.
I can find a myriad of newspaper articles from the 1870’s and early 1880’s which report on the activities of a Vaudeville troupe of women who were billed as, among other titles, “The Dizzy Blondes.” They went all over the US. There are enough articles about various women who were part of this troupe of actors who had “off-stage” problems to pretty well ascertain that a “dizzy blonde” from this period was probably the forerunner of the “dumb blonde” of the 1900’s.
The question remains whether the cultural stereotype remained active in the U.S. from the 1870s on, or was revived later.
Interestingly, “peroxide blonde” as a term only dates from 1918. I wouldn’t be surprised if the change to blondness on the part of a lot of young women, presumably including many flappers, helped push that stereotype into national awareness. Something that the savvy Loos would be the first to jump on with her book.
One other source that may go back deep into the annals of vaudeville and Broadway is the chorus girl joke, which newspapermen and press agents never tired of telling. The heyday for the chorus girl probably starts in the early 1900s as theaters multiply in New York City and elsewhere. But again the combination of girl, columnist, movie, and image probably hits a peak in the 1920s.
!!! Cite?
Sometime this year Steven Colbert did a routine about some conservative’s complaint that the “blonde race” is in danger of dying out. (Try selling that in Iceland!)
BTW – since this is GQ – is there perhaps some scientific evidence that (natural, genetic) blondes really are stupider on average than the general population?
Obligatory blonde joke:
Q: How do you drown a blonde?
A: Glue a mirror to the bottom of a swimming pool!
(Try making that work as a Polish joke!)
From an 1897 news story
and from 1910
and 1904
Interesting. I got the cite from the Online Etymology Dictionary, which is normally quite good on dates.
However, both your 1910 and 1914 cites concern chorus girls which fit in well with my speculations.
Cite? Brown is probably the most common color for white adults, but a cite for the part about “most” of them being fair haired as children?