Most of the folks I've talked to have come to the conclusion that the old fairy tales were, indeed, designed to teach a lesson to young children...though not necessarily the lesson you might think.
Take Red Riding Hood, for example. Little girl leaves the path in the woods, talks to a wolf, who goes to her granmother's house, eats the gransmother, when Red arrives, eats Red, and has a nap until the woodsman comes by to rescue the two hapless women in the wolf's belly. Upon their release, the two women fill the wolf's belly with stones, giving him a bellyache. When he goes to the river for a drink of water to soothe his digestion, he falls in, is weighed down by the stones, and drowns.
The lesson here is not (character assassination of the wolf aside) that Red and Grandma had to wait for the woodsman to rescue them...it's that wise children shouldn't go off in the woods alone and talk to strangers.
Basic safety lesson, packaged in a format to hold the young attention. The same can be seen in other fairy tales...in Cinderella, for example, Cinderella is the good, well-behaved, kind generous child who is ill-treated, but who winds up being rewarded in the end for that good behavior, while her ill-behaved stepsisters and stepmother have their eyes plucked out by Cinderella's bird friends, and are blinded for the rest of their lives. Basic lessons on desirable social behavior.
Now I will admit that during the time in which most of these tales were written, women occupied a lower social standing than men in most respects. Most girls were married by 13 and expecting their first child by 14 at the latest. So there may be some elements in there of "proper feminine behavior" as reflected in the society that brought us the stories in the first place...but I don't believe those were the sole original intentions of the stories.
