When Joanna (Katharine Ross) and Walter (Peter Masterson) move to a small suburb just outside New York where Joanna finds that all her female neighbours are just too good to be true.
The married women go about their housework in a suspiciously happy way and seem to be without original thought or a sense of their own importance.
To her horror, Joanna realises that her neighbours have been replaced by compliant domestic sex robots - and that her husband Walter is showing suspicious signs of being interested in replacing her.
Realising that she is in great danger she plots her escape - but is hindered when the men of Stepford hide her offspring.
In a race against time she tries to locate her children before she is replaced by RoboJoanna.