I agree with everything you say, except this. When we see the women it’s easy to *assume *they’re waifs in distress because in the desert they are, so to speak, fish out of water. But immediately after the water scene they get involved in the Max/Furiosa fight, showing bravery and commitment despite their lack of experience. Later, it becomes clear that they haven’t been dragged along - the escape is their idea. Furiosa is the operational leader of the breakout due to her experience and skills, but the spiritual leader of the group is Angharrad. When she dies, the women say that she was the one who said women weren’t things, she was the one who asked “Who broke the world?”, she was the one who decided they should escape to the green place. The older wife says the same thing. The strength of purpose Angharrad shows in shielding Furiosa from Joe was always there, it didn’t develop in the c.24 hours of the escape.
Further to that, even after Max and Nux had won the fist fight with Furiosa Angharrad still doesn’t submit, she basically tells Max to go hang and walks towards the rig to leave. It takes Max actually shooting her in the leg to make her stop. She was no damsel in distress at any point.
Honestly, if I were put in charge of feminist iconography, I would immediately adopt the bolt cutter as a symbol of female liberation.
(Don’t put me in charge of feminist iconography. Please.)
Let’s go to the quarry and throw stuff down there!
I had to explain to everyone backstage why I was making noise! Our producer, a woman, said “Yeah, if we hold a contest first, I don’t think he has anything to worry about.”
Intriguing Idea!
How so?
You also could not have a fully functioning rock concert mounted on the back of a truck capable of going seventy miles an hour. (Absent a way of finding crude oil and refining it, you could have no vehicles at all. Gasoline doesn’t keep for long.) I think it has to be borne in mind the film isn’t supposed to be entirely realistic; it is, indeed, a very deliberate combination of the realistic and the absurd.
I’m assuming, because the focus was on saving the thin, pretty women from the harem, but nobody cared about saving the fat, ugly women who were literally being used as milk cows.
Well, it’s easier to stuff thin women into a secret compartment inside one’s truck. 
That said … Furiosa’s motive for helping the wives is not fully fleshed out. Was it specifically to piss off Joe? It would make more sense to help his wives than to help his milk-cows, if so. He may not have given much of a shit if he lost a few cows, compared to losing his wives.
This kinda bugged me too, hell what about the war boys? Brain washed sons? of Joe that are basically cannon fodder slaves.
The wives wanted to escape. The Warboys didn’t - they were totally into Joe’s war cult.
I thought she was helping out the wives, b/c they are the ones who were asking for help. They were the ones who asked the question: “Who killed the world?” And seem to came up with a sort of answer. Furiosa just wanted get back home and took the wives as part of her redemption. But the wives already wanted to run.
True - we have no idea if the milk cows wanted to escape, or had bought into the cult like the Warboys.
I like all of these comments! 
Perhaps the movie is deeper than I thought it was
Perhaps Joe bought the women from other settlements, or found them on raids?
I assumed part of Furiosa’s motive was that she was previously part of Joe’s harem, whether she was ejected for being too old or too resistant or just proved more valuable in the field is unknown.
My guess is that they simply didn’t want to leave their children behind - they’re lactating, so they must have been pregnant some time not too long past. (I’m not sure how long a woman can lactate past child birth, if she’s being constantly milked like the women in the movie.) My guess is that Joe takes the most beautiful women he can find, gets them pregnant repeatedly, until they lose their figure, then moves them to milk cow duty while he goes raiding for a replacement. So, while the wives are basically being raped on a regular basis, the ex-wives are safe from Joe’s attentions, and can enjoy a place of relative status at the top of the mesa, as opposed to living with the rabble at its base. Which is probably more appealing that taking a risk on fleeing into the wasteland.
I don’t think that’s the case - I don’t see how a woman stuck in Joe’s harem would ever have the opportunity to prove herself in the field. I don’t see him risking her like that. When Furiosa meets her old tribe, we learn that she was very young when she and her mother were kidnapped, and that her mother died after not too long in captivity. So I’m thinking that Furiosa’s mom was in the harem, and died as a result in some way. Furiosa was too young for the harem, but keeps making trouble in some other way, such as constant escape attempts, which impress Joe enough that he gives her a place in the war parties, which she eventually winds up leading. Her eventual rebellion is a combination of long-simmering anger over her mother’s death, and her own guilt in her complicity in securing new wives for Joe.
You’re probably right, I was assuming some backstory where Furiosa is such a pain in the ass for Joe he kicks her out of the harem and sends on some suicide mission she surprisingly survives(maybe how she loses her arm).
How does the timeline work though, I noticed right away that Furiosa implied she was born into a post apoc world, but that seems impossible. Max was an adult with a wife and child when the world went to shit, and he looks just as old as Furiosa.
In Thunderdome it is less than two decades since society crumbled, the only way Fury Road’s timeline makes sense is if it was originally written for an older Max maybe played by Gibson.
I’m pretty sure Furiosa was never in the harem. All of the Wives, unlike pretty much everyone else in the film except Max, are healthy and without visible birth defects or mutations of any kind. That’s what makes them valuable as breeders - I think being pretty was just a happy coincidence. Furiosa, having been born without an arm (there’s no scarring on the stump at all as there would have been if it were from an injury) would not be eligible.
Remember, Joe has two sons - the dwarf with the telescope and the big hulking muscley guy with the oxygen tank. Both of them have high status, but they’re both “defective”. When Angharad’s baby is presented, they make a big deal about him being “perfect in every way” (except for being stillborn due to his mother’s death).
I think the milk mothers (I really don’t like thinking of women as cows, even though that’s what they were treated like) were women who had borne children, but the children died or were defective or mutated and so were taken from them to be War Boys. I wonder what happened to the girls?