Two or Three Things I Know for Sure spans several decades and occurs in several locales, so the historical period is important context for the story. The earliest events in the memoir occur during Allison’s childhood in Greenville, South Carolina. By the late 1960s, Allison is in Florida—and later, California—and is deeply engaged with the feminist movement.

During the 1960s, feminism emerged as a potent political and cultural force that demanded women be recognized as political agents. Another part of the work of the feminist movement was for women themselves to unlearn internalized misogyny. The power of that movement finds expression in many moments in the memoir, including protests like the one Allison and Flo engage in when they attend the karate class. The feminist movement is also evident in self-help and in women-only spaces like the feminist collective where Allison lives when she’s in her early twenties, as well as in Allison’s unabashed celebration of the body and in her understanding of her identity as a lesbian woman as in part a centering of love of women as a political act.

Allison’s relationship with feminism is complicated, however, and reflects what happened to feminism in the 1970s through the 1990s—the memoir was published in 1995.