Abigail Heyman, a photographer whose stark portraits of women at work, at home and at weddings gave a visual concreteness to feminist doctrine of the 1970s about the oppressiveness of traditional female roles, died on May 28 at her home in Manhattan. She was 70.

The cause was heart failure, said her son, Lazar Bloch.

Ms. Heyman was known best for her 1974 book, “Growing Up Female: A Personal Photo-Journal,” a sort of illustrated encyclopedia of women performing self-limiting roles. In claustrophobic black-and-white images of almost clinical detail, she portrayed women in curlers shopping for groceries; women as spectators, watching men do things they enjoy; a nude dancer at a strip joint flat on her back, legs apart; a woman at a kitchen table in an apparent stupor of fatigue, a wailing baby on the changing table nearby; little girls playing with dolls.

In one of the book’s most arresting images, Ms. Heyman photographed herself undergoing an abortion.

Her book, she said, was “one feminist’s point of view” of the narrow range of choices women had in their lives, which she hoped her work would help to expand. Frequently displayed in women’s bookstores — in the heyday of women’s bookstores — next to the best-selling feminist guidebook “Our Bodies, Ourselves,” Ms. Heyman’s “Growing Up Female” sold more than 35,000 copies, an unusually high number for photograph collections.

A 1978 book, “Butcher, Baker, Cabinetmaker,” was devoted to working women, and in “Dreams & Schemes: Love and Marriage in Modern Times” (1987), Ms. Heyman explored weddings — she attended 200 — with an eye for backstage drama that anticipated the granular detail, minus the bad taste, of reality television.