Three stories about women in three different time periods. The problem for all the protagonists is the same - the difficult coexistence of their work and private lives. Stella is a peasant woman at the end of the 1940s. She has three children and is working very hard to buy a piece of land. Sonia is a student from Milan in the early 1970s who has won a scholarship to study in Rome. Finally, in contemporary Italy, Silvia and her husband work in a mail order house. She is a telephone operator and he is head of a department.