Sonia Pressman Fuentes, who was born in Berlin, Germany, of Polish parents, came to the U.S. with her immediate family in 1934 to escape the Holocaust. She graduated as valedictorian of her high school in Monticello, New York, Phil Beta Kappa from Cornell University, and first in her class at the University of Miami (FL) School of Law.
She was an attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice, the National Labor Relations Board, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), and the U.S. Department of Housing & Urban Development in Washington, D.C. She was the first woman attorney in the Office of the General Counsel at the EEOC and drafted a number of the Commission’s landmark guidelines and decisions. She was a co-founder of NOW, WEAL (the Women’s Equity Action League), and FEW (Federally Employed Women) and a charter member of VFA (Veteran Feminists of America). She was one of the longest-serving board members in the history of NWP (National Woman’s Party).
She also served as an attorney and executive, respectively, at the headquarters of GTE Service Corporation and TRW Inc., and was the highest-paid woman employee at each of those headquarters.
In 1993, she retired from the federal government and thereafter wrote her memoir, Eat First—You Don’t Know What They’ll Give You: The Adventures of an Immigrant Family and Their Feminist Daughter, and embarked on new careers as a writer and public speaker.
She was inducted into the Maryland Women's Hall of Fame and is included in the online exhibit of the Jewish Women’s Archive of 74 Jewish-American women who contributed significantly to women’s rights.
On June 9, 2008, she was one of 36 feminist lawyers honored by the Veteran Feminists of America at the Harvard Club in New York City for significant contributions to women’s rights in the 1963-75 time period.
She is featured in Feminist: Stories from Women’s Liberation, a documentary film about the second wave of the women’s movement that was released in early 2013.
In September 2013, Sonia spent a week in Antwerp, Belgium participating in the opening of the Red Star Line (RSL) Museum. The RSL Museum, dedicated to immigration and the RSL, has a permanent exhibit about Sonia and her family. She is one of five surviving passengers of RSL ships about whom the Museum staff knows and was the only surviving passenger who was present at, and participated in, the opening events.
