The film juxtaposes the lives of two diverse representatives of women: Mary, a 33 year old English factory worker and housewife, and Ssuzsa, a 37 year old Hungarian graduate engineer. The two women are obviously different. Mary left school at 15, worked in a Birmingham engineering factory, became a shop steward, left, married (for the second time) and started a family. Ssuzsa, in Hungary, appears to be intellectual, introverted and earnest. She had some nerve-wrecking experiences in World War II and during the 1956 riots, but she is now a successful computer engineer and studying for a PhD in Budapest and Moscow. She is married and childless.

The film moves seamlessly between Birmingham and Budapest, en route in each country listening to the voices of individual women, who without exception complain about feeling economically and socially oppressed. At the end of the film, amid lively sequences of partying, both Ssuzsa and Mary seem to pronounce their attitudes to capitalism and communism with the words of 'a curse on both your houses.'

In an interview in the GUARDIAN, Raymond Gardner pressed the director for her own view on the situation: 'I don't offer solutions. The film talks for itself through the two people in it.'