The whole poem consists of a series of juxtapositions, laid out over the course of 10 sections. The conceit of the poem is that these sections are "Snapshots" of a woman's life—or slices of women's lives in general (since the poem includes episodes from history and literature). Only some of the "Snapshots" are grounded in visual imagery; section 7, for example, is more meditative. But the poet juxtaposes them in order to craft a broader argument or story, much as one might do with a collage of photos. In the end, the whole is greater than the sum of its 10 parts.
As a simple example, sections 1 and 2 juxtapose the daughter-in-law's life with her daughter's life. (Section 1 focuses more on the former, section 2 on the latter.) Through this juxtaposition, the poet illustrates a generation gap between mother and daughter—namely, the way the mother seems stuck in the past while her daughter's ambitions for the future remain "insatiable."
However, not every juxtaposition is this straightforward. Section 4 portrays women (including the poet Emily Dickinson) doing housework in a mood of suppressed fury, while section 5 portrays a woman (perhaps the daughter-in-law's daughter, the "she" from section 2) shaving her legs. There is no direct relationship between the two vignettes, but both show women conforming to gendered expectations in a patriarchal society. Although the "iron-eyed" woman dusting the house "every day of life" seems more obviously unhappy than the woman shaving her legs, the unpleasant simile in the second vignette ("until they gleam / like petrified mammoth-tusk") makes the poet's skeptical perspective clear. Patriarchal standards, the juxtaposition implies, force women into uncomfortable or degrading routines, whether these involve maintaining the home or grooming the body.
Through implied comparisons like these, the poem portrays female dissatisfaction across a range of times, cultures, and literary traditions. In some ways, the poem mimics the metaphorical "steamer-trunk" in section 3: that is, it contains an assemblage of seemingly random items, which together show what it is to be a woman. Or, again, the poem works like a thematically arranged photo album, grouping portraits of male misogyny with illustrations of female suffering and persistence. (The last section, which adapts an image from the French feminist writer Simone de Beauvoir, offsets the sadder "Snapshots" with a more hopeful vision.)