Quick Facts
Biography
Sonia Pressman Fuentes (born May 30, 1928) is an American author, speaker, feminist leader, and lawyer. She was born in Berlin, Germany, of Polish parents, with whom she came to the U.S. to escape the Holocaust. In the U.S., she became one of the founders of the second wave of the women’s movement. She was a co-founder of the National Organization for Women (NOW) and Federally Employed Women (FEW), and she was the first woman attorney in the Office of the General Counsel at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).
Fuentes is the author of a memoir, Eat First—You Don’t Know What They’ll Give You, The Adventures of an Immigrant Family and Their Feminist Daughter, which has been required reading at Cornell University and American University in Washington, D.C. Her articles on women’s rights and other subjects have been published in newspapers, magazines, and journals in the U.S. and throughout the world.
Fuentes has given talks throughout the U.S. as well as in Germany, Spain, Japan, China, the Philippines, Singapore, Indonesia, and Thailand. She has served as an “American specialist” on women’s rights for the then-U.S. Information Agency.
She is a member of the Maryland Women’s Hall of Fame. Since 1994 Fuentes has been a resident of Sarasota, Florida as a snowbird and permanently, since 2009.