Alloway had not been lavish in his praise of the women's collective X 12 show in 1970. The work may have had a certain “primitivistic merit” and “fervor,” but it was characterized by “clumsiness,” “perverseness,” and “grossness.” Generally, it was “simplistic.” This was hardly the language of praise or empowerment. 1971 was an important year in the development of women's art. Linda Nochlin, who arranged a stream on “Women as sex object” at the annual conference of the College Art Association, published “Why have there been no great women artists?” in Art News in January, an essay that was reprinted in Art and Sexual Politics, published later in the year. Lucy Lippard selected a group of Twenty-six Contemporary Women Artists at the Larry Aldrych Museum of Contemporary Art, and this became the model for a sequence of subsequent shows. Thirteen Women Artists was a co-operative show held at 117–119 Prince Street in 1972; its sequel, the same year at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Albany, was called New York Women Artists. In 1972 The Feminist Art Journal commenced publication; later in the year the A.I.R. Gallery (appropriating the commonly used initials for the legal term Artist-in-Residence that referred to the new use of industrial buildings in SoHo), a women's co-operative gallery, opened and was followed, in 1973, by another co-operative gallery for women, SoHo 20. In that year of reassessment for Alloway, the “Women in the Arts” group organized a large exhibition at the New York Cultural Center, and there were a number of smaller exhibitions. Together, “These shows,” Alloway remarked, “began to make possible a detailed exploration of women's art…” just as, in 1971, a similar exploration of Black art had been possible. As he put it in 1974, “Without these exhibitions… the definition of the subject would still be restricted to the propagandistic posture of reaction against male domination that characterized W.A.R.”

Even in 1972 Alloway was arguing against a quota system of 50 per cent women for the Whitney Annual because it would have “perpetuated jumble and surrendered aesthetic judgements to permanent political manipulation.” But, by 1973 a transformation in his view of women's art had occurred. The main reason—the series of shows that convinced him women's art had moved beyond “simplistic” assertiveness—included those at the A.I.R. Gallery.