What impressed Alloway about women's art in the first half of the 1970s was its range. “It is clear,” he wrote in 1974, “that women artists are able across the board, from abstract to realist forms.” In an outline for an unpublished book on Recent Women's Art, Alloway argued for “Women's art as part of the expansion of aesthetics beyond linear aesthetics.” Their work had made a major contribution to pluralism, in terms both of his 1970s’ notion of offering an alternative, socio-cultural approach to art, and of his 1960s’ notion of an increase in the range of visual options. Within those options, he felt that of especial importance was—to use the title of one of his lectures of the mid-1970s—“The contribution of women to the renewal of realism.” Like Linda Nochlin, who was also interested in women realists such as Sylvia Mangold, Yvonne Jacquette, and Janet Fish, Alloway perceived a strong strain of realism in women's art, in part because realism had the potential to express direct experiences about existence, and provide a “legible iconography” in a way that was not possible with abstraction. Rather than accept the claim for “the involuntary presence of concentricity,” Alloway favoured the voluntary adoption of realism: “At a time when realists are more militant, a formula that equates realism with women might be in the interests of both sides.” Thus, a female artist could be classed as a realist as well as a member of the women's art movement—Alice Neel, for example, a supporter of feminist causes, was also “absolutely a realist.” Alloway always used the term “realism” broadly, collapsing realism and naturalism, so realism, for him, is “art produced by the artist's perception of solid objects in threedimensional space.” More importantly, as he put it from the vantage point of 1980,