Set at the end of 1880, the film depicts the invention of the vibrator. Dr. Mortimer Granville (Hugh Dancy) is a young physician who has difficulty with his occupation due to constant arguments over modern medicine. He gets a job assisting Dr. Dalrymple (Jonathan Pryce), whose practice specializes in the treatment of "hysteria", a popular diagnosis for women of that time. Medical practitioners like Dr. Dalrymple tried to manage hysteria by massaging the genital area, decently covered under a curtain, to elicit "paroxysmal convulsions", without recognizing that they were inducing orgasms. Granville meets Dr. Dalrymple's daughters, Emily (Felicity Jones), and her older sister Charlotte (Maggie Gyllenhaal), a premodern feminist who runs a settlement house in a poor section of London.
Doris Attinger (Judy Holliday) follows her husband (Tom Ewell) with a gun one day after suspecting he is having an affair with another woman (Jean Hagen). In her rage, she fires at the couple multiple times. One of the bullets hits her husband in the shoulder.
One thousand years have passed since the Seven Days of Fire, an apocalyptic war that destroyed human civilization and gave birth to the vast Toxic Jungle, a forest swarming with giant mutant insects in which everything is lethal to humans. Scattered settlements exist wherever the Toxic Jungle relents, with the Valley of the Wind being one such settlement. The Valley's settlers have a prophecy about a saviour, "clothed in blue robes, descending onto a golden field, to join bonds with the great earth and guide the people to the pure lands at last".
Best friends Enid and Rebecca face summer after their high-school graduation. The girls are social outcasts, but Rebecca is more popular with boys than Enid. Enid's diploma is held on the condition that she attend a remedial art class. Even though she is a talented artist, her art teacher, Roberta, believes art must be socially meaningful and dismisses Enid's sketches as "light entertainment."
Joanna Eberhart is a young wife who moves with her husband Walter (Peter Masterson) and two children from New York City to the idyllic Connecticut suburb of Stepford. Loneliness quickly sets in as Joanna, a mildly rebellious aspiring photographer, finds the women in town all look great and are obsessed with housework, but have few intellectual interests. The men all belong to the clubbish Stepford Men's Association, which Walter joins to Joanna's dismay. Neighbor Carol Van Sant's sexually submissive behavior to her husband Ted, and her odd, repetitive behavior after a car accident also strike Joanna as unusual.
The Young Girls of Rochefort takes place over the course of one weekend in the seaside town of Rochefort, where a fair is coming to the town square. The story centers on twin sisters Delphine (Deneuve) and Solange (Dorléac) — Delphine teaches ballet classes and Solange gives music lessons for a living, but each longs to find her ideal love and a life outside of Rochefort. When the fair comes to town, Delphine and Solange meet two smooth-talking but kind-hearted carnies, Étienne (George Chakiris) and Bill (Grover Dale).
Centuries ago, the Amazons, a proud and fierce race of warrior women, led by their Queen, Hippolyta (voiced by Virginia Madsen), battled Ares (voiced by Alfred Molina), the god of war, and his army. During the battle, Hippolyta beheaded her son, Thrax (voiced by Jason Miller), whom Ares forcibly conceived with her, who is fighting for his father. Hippolyta then defeated Ares, but Zeus (voiced by David McCallum) stopped her from delivering the death strike. Instead, Hera (voiced by Marg Helgenberger) bound his powers with magic bracers so that he was deprived of his ability to draw power from the aura of violence and death he could instigate, effectively rendering him mortal, and only another god could release him. In compensation, the Amazons were granted the island of Themyscira, where they would remain eternally youthful and isolated from Man in the course of their duty of holding Ares prisoner for all eternity. Later, Hippolyta was granted a daughter, Princess Diana (voiced by Keri Russell), whom she shaped from the sand of the Themyscirian seashore and gave life with her own blood.
Nisi (Halle Berry) and Mickey (Natalie Desselle-Reid) are waitresses in a soul food diner in Decatur, Georgia. Their dream is to open the world's first combination hair salon and soul food restaurant.
The film plot takes its starting point from the French play The Human Voice (La Voix humaine, 1930) by Jean Cocteau where a desperate woman tries to avoid being dumped by her lover through a series of phone calls. In the film TV actress Pepa Marcos (Carmen Maura) is depressed and taking sleeping pills because her boyfriend Iván (Fernando Guillén) has just left her. Both she and Iván work as voice-over actors who dub foreign films, notably Johnny Guitar with Joan Crawford and Sterling Hayden. The voice he uses to sweet-talk her (and many other women) is the same one he uses in his work. He is about to leave on a trip and has asked Pepa to pack his things in a suitcase that he will pick up later.
Where Do We Go Now? tells the story of a remote, isolated unnamed Lebanese village inhabited by both Muslims and Christians. The village is surrounded by land mines and only reachable by a small bridge. As civil strife engulfed the country, the women in the village learn of this fact and try, by various means and to varying success, to keep their men in the dark, sabotaging the village radio, then destroying the village TV.
Beth left her small town and, despite her parents' disapproval, married Jake "the Muss" Heke. After 18 years they live in an unkempt state house in an unnamed New Zealand city and have five children. Their interpretations of life and being Māori are tested. Their eldest daughter, Grace, keeps a journal in which she chronicles events as well as stories she tells her younger siblings.
During the Second World War, Kay Walsh (Goldie Hawn) is a woman who has been assigned to work in an armaments factory in California while her husband Jack (Ed Harris), a Leading Seaman, is overseas in naval service.
In an enchanted forest, a unicorn learns she is the last of her kind. A butterfly reveals that a demonic animal called the Red Bull herded her kind to the ends of the earth. Venturing into unfamiliar territory beyond the safety of her home, the Unicorn journeys to find them and bring them back.
At a young age, Jackie Kallen learns about boxing with her father and uncle in a small gym. Later, she becomes the assistant to a Cleveland boxing promoter. Her boss then begins doing business with Sam LaRocca, a sports manager, during a middleweight championship fight.
Tina Balser, an educated, frustrated housewife and mother, is in a loveless marriage with Jonathan, an insufferable, controlling, emotionally abusive, social-climbing lawyer in New York City. He treats her like a servant, undermines her with insults, and belittles her appearance, abilities and the raising of their two girls, who treat their mother with the same rudeness as their father. Searching for relief, she begins a sexually fulfilling affair with a cruel and coarse writer, George Prager, who treats her with similar brusqueness and contempt, which only drives her deeper into despair. She then tries group therapy, but this also proves fruitless when she finds her male psychiatrist, Dr. Linstrom, as well as the other participants, equally shallow and abusive.