Sonia Pressman Fuentes, Early Women’s Rights Lawyer, Dies at 97

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Sonia Pressman Fuentes, Early Women’s Rights Lawyer, Dies at 97

In a conversation with the feminist writer Betty Friedan, she planted the seed that became the National Organization for Women.

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Sonia Pressman Fuentes at the Red Star Line Museum in Antwerp, Belgium, in 2013. Ms. Fuentes’ family was Jewish, and fled to the United States on the Red Star Line in 1934.

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Virginia Mayo/Associated Press

By

Trip Gabriel

April 25, 2026,

1:31 p.m. ET

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Sonia Pressmen Fuentes, an early women’s rights lawyer who told the feminist author Betty Friedan that women needed an advocacy group to fight for them the way the N.A.A.C.P. fought for Black Americans, planting the seed for the National Organization for Women, died on Dec. 20 in Sarasota, Fla. She was 97.

Her death, which was not widely reported at the time, was confirmed by a friend, Nancy Gold.

In 1965, Ms. Fuentes became the first female attorney in the general counsel’s office at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, a new agency that had been created to enforce Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited discrimination in hiring and in the workplace.

Title VII, as originally written, only protected people from hiring discrimination based on race, religion and national origin. Protections based on sex were added at the last minute, but, as Ms. Fuentes discovered, many at the E.E.O.C. had little interest in fighting sex discrimination.

It was the predawn of the modern women’s movement, when male and female roles were still narrowly prescribed. Job openings were listed as “Help Wanted — Men” and “Help Wanted — Women.” Public schools required teachers to quit if they got pregnant. Airlines grounded flight attendants who married or reached their early 30s.

Invited to speak to employers and unions about the new anti-discrimination law, Ms. Fuentes found that “any reference to women’s rights was greeted with laughter,” she recalled in a 1999 memoir, “Eat First — You Don’t Know What They’ll Give You.”

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Ms. Fuentes published a memoir in 1999. “Friends and acquaintances, like my parents, were taken aback to learn that I was thinking of becoming an attorney,” she wrote. “Young women in the ’50s did not become attorneys.”

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Xlibris US

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