The Little Red Hen is an old folk tale

Folklore

Folklore consists of legends, music, oral history, proverbs, jokes, popular beliefs, fairy tales and customs that are the traditions of a culture, subculture, or group. It is also the set of practices through which those expressive genres are shared. The study of folklore is sometimes called...

, most likely of Russia

Russia

Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...

n origin. The best known version in the United States is that popularized by Little Golden Books

Little Golden Books

Little Golden Books is a popular series of children's books. The first 12 titles were published on October 1, 1942:#Three Little Kittens#Bedtime Stories#Mother Goose#Prayers for Children#The Little Red Hen#Nursery Songs...

, 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

Work ethic

Work ethic is a set of values based on hard work and diligence. It is also a belief in the moral benefit of work and its ability to enhance character. An example would be the Protestant work ethic...

 and personal initiative. It is so well known that it is frequently rewritten by pundits

Pundit (politics)

A pundit is someone who offers to mass media his or her opinion or commentary on a particular subject area on which they are knowledgeable. The term has been increasingly applied to popular media personalities...

 and bloggers to illustrate their favorite points.

Role in reading instruction

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, considering 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.

Plot summary

In the tale, The Little Red Hen finds a grain of wheat

Wheat

Wheat is a cereal grain, originally from the Levant region of the Near East, but now cultivated worldwide. In 2007 world production of wheat was 607 million tons, making it the third most-produced cereal after maize and rice...

, and asks for help from the other farmyard animal

Animal

Animals are a major group of multicellular, eukaryotic organisms of the kingdom Animalia or Metazoa. Their body plan eventually becomes fixed as they develop, although some undergo a process of metamorphosis later on in their life. Most animals are motile, meaning they can move spontaneously and...

s 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

Bread

Bread is a staple food prepared by cooking a dough of flour and water and often additional ingredients. Doughs are usually baked, but in some cuisines breads are steamed , fried , or baked on an unoiled frying pan . It may be leavened or unleavened...

), 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."

In other versions sometimes the bread is substituted with a cake

Cake

Cake is a form of bread or bread-like food. In its modern forms, it is typically a sweet and enriched baked dessert. In its oldest forms, cakes were normally fried breads or cheesecakes, and normally had a disk shape...

, and a plot variant is sometimes used, in which from that day forward, whenever the red hen worked on food, she found volunteers and hence shared the results with all those who aided her. There is, in addition, a "happy ending" version, without any moral, in which the hen shares the bread with the non-participants, despite their failure to help.

In popular culture

Revisions of the story include a current political version, based on a Ronald Reagan

Ronald Reagan

Ronald Wilson Reagan was the 40th President of the United States , the 33rd Governor of California and, prior to that, a radio, film and television actor....

 monologue from 1976. 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

Poverty

Poverty is the lack of a certain amount of material possessions or money. Absolute poverty or destitution is inability to afford basic human needs, which commonly includes clean and fresh water, nutrition, health care, education, clothing and shelter. About 1.7 billion people are estimated to live...

 for the entire barnyard.

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.

Malvina Reynolds

Malvina Reynolds

Malvina Reynolds was an American folk/blues singer-songwriter and political activist, best known for her song-writing, particularly the songs "Little Boxes" and "Morningtown Ride".-Early life:...

 gave a twist to the story by making it a socialist anthem.

See also

• The Ant and the Grasshopper
  The Ant and the Grasshopper
  The Ant and the Grasshopper, also known as The Grasshopper and the Ant , is one of Aesop's Fables, providing an ambivalent moral lesson about hard work and foresight. In the Perry Index it is number 373...
  
  , Aesop's fable with a similar moral
• The Wise Little Hen
  The Wise Little Hen
  The Wise Little Hen is a Walt Disney's Silly Symphonies cartoon, based on the fairy tale The Little Red Hen. This cartoon marked the debut of Donald Duck. Donald and his friend Peter Pig try to avoid work by faking stomach aches until Mrs. Hen teaches them the value of labor. This cartoon was...
  
  , a Disney-produced Silly Symphony which uses this tale as its basis.

External links

• The Little Red Hen and other stories (HTML version), Retold and Illustrated by Florence White Williams, 1914, from Project Gutenberg
  Project Gutenberg
  Project Gutenberg is a volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works, to "encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks". Founded in 1971 by Michael S. Hart, it is the oldest digital library. Most of the items in its collection are the full texts of public domain books...