What stories are women telling about themselves these days? What are the narratives that shape women's fantasy lives and experiences? How can women use the existing mediums of film, performance, and autobiography to tell their own stories, their own lives, their own fantasies? In her new book, Old Wives' Tales, Tania Modleski, one of our most eloquent and exacting scholars of women's popular culture, answers these questions by addressing how, and under what conditions, women might become the makers and not simply the bearers of meaning; how, in other words, women can tell instead of being told.As she has throughout her career, Modleski redraws the perimeter of popular culture, alerting readers to a body of recent work that has gone under-examined. In addition to discussing recent women's films such as The Ballad of Little Jo, The Piano, and Dogfight, the book also takes up performance, autobiographical experience, and contemporary social issues to illustrate how genres -- the often told stories people use to make sense of the world -- mediate between us and reality. Old Wives' Tales begins by examining the changes occurring in traditional women's genres, such as romances and melodrama, and moves on to explore the phenomenon of woman authors and performers who "cross-dress" -- women, that is, who are moving into male genres and staking out territory declared off-limits by men and by many feminists.Written in Modleski's trademark style -- equal parts rigor and lucidity -- Old Wives' Tales pursues a more complex feminism that affirms similarities while acknowledging differences.