The Little Red Hen is an old folk tale, most likely of Russian origin. The best known version in the United States is that popularized by Little Golden Books, a series of children's books published for the mass market since the 1940s. The story is applied in teaching children the virtues of the work ethic and personal initiative. It is so well known that it is frequently rewritten by pundits and bloggers to illustrate their favorite points.
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During the 1880s, reading instruction in the United States continued to evolve to include primers that became known as literature readers. Prior to this time highly moralistic and religious texts were used to teach reading. The Little Red Hen offers a transition to less blatant religious and moralistic tales while still emphasizing a clear moral. During this time, consideration of the interest of the young reader became more central to the teaching of reading. In considering the young reader, the authors of this genre made their texts appealing visually both through illustrations and text formatting. "Margaret Free and Harriette Taylor Treadwell were the first authors to prepare beginning readers with a content consisting wholly of adaptations from the old folktales." (Smith, 1965/2002, p. 141). The genre of the folktale lent itself to repetitive vocabulary - an early reading strategy still in use today.
In the tale, The Little Red Hen finds a grain of wheat, and asks for help from the other farmyard animals to plant it. However, no animal will volunteer to help her.
At each further stage (harvest, threshing, milling the wheat into flour, and baking the flour into bread), the hen again asks for help from the other animals, but again she gets no assistance.
Finally, the hen has completed her task, and asks who will help her eat the bread. This time, all the previous non-participants eagerly volunteer. However, she declines their help, stating that no one aided her in the preparation work, and eats it with her chicks, leaving none for anyone else.
The moral of this story is that those who show no willingness to contribute to an end product do not deserve to enjoy the end product: "if a man does not work, let him not eat."
Revisions of the story include a current political version, based on a Ronald Reagan monologue from 1976.[1] The farmer claims that the hen is being unfair if she does not share her bread with the other animals, and forces her to share her bread with those who would not work for it. This in turn removes the hen's incentive to work, resulting in poverty for the entire barnyard.[2]
It was also widely used as an analogy to defend President George W. Bush's decision to bar companies from countries opposed to the Iraq War from bidding on contracts for reconstruction work.[3]
Malvina Reynolds gave a twist to the story by making it a socialist anthem.