Sonia Pressman Fuentes, Co-Founder of NOW, has Died

Sonia Pressman Fuentes, pioneering EEOC lawyer, co-founder of NOW, and a leading voice of second-wave feminism, has died at 97. Born in Berlin in May 1928, she and her family fled Nazi Germany in 1933, eventually settling in New York. She grew up in the Bronx in the Catskills and graduated valedictorian of Monticello High School. She went on to graduate Phi Beta Kappa from Cornell University in 1950 and she graduated first in her class and summa cum laude from the University of Miami Law in 1957. In 1965, she became the first woman attorney in the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, drafting pivotal Title VII interpretations, including a landmark 1968 ruling that dismantled gender discrimination in airlines who demanded stewardesses resign upon marriage.

Frustrated by institutional resistance, she urged Betty Friedan to launch a dedicated civil-rights organization for women, becoming the co-founder of NOW – the National Organization of Women, and helped establish the Women’s Equity Action League and Federally Employed Women, turning legal precedents into major victories. Her decades of federal service at the Department of Justice, the National Labor Relations Board, and the Department of Urban Development, corporate leadership, and honors led to such as the induction into the Maryland Women’s Hall of Fame—cemented her legacy. Sonia also received the Veteran Feminists of America Medal of Honor. Later in life, Mrs. Fuentes returned to Antwerp in September of 2013 as an honored guest of the Red Star Line Museum. Drawing on a rediscovered diary of her brother Hermann, she worked closely with museum historians to reconstruct her family’s refugee history as her Jewish roots was of the utmost importance to her.