Honoree Profile: Sonia Pressman Fuentes

Sonia Pressman Fuentes graduated summa cum laude and first in her class from the University of Miami (FL) School of Law in 1957, at a time when women constituted 11 out of the 139 in her class and 3 percent of the country's law school graduates. In 1965, she joined the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission as the first woman lawyer in its Office of the General Counsel. Set up by Congress to implement the employment provisions of the newly enacted Civil Rights Act of 1964, the commission had attracted mainly staffers focused on race discrimination.

The employment provisions were the only part of the bill that included "sex" as a category of discrimination, and Fuentes served as the EEOC staffer who always raised the issue of sex discrimination whenever any issue or case was discussed.

In that role, she identified the many cutting-edge sex discrimination issues, some of which were not posed by prohibitions in employment based on race, color, or religion. These involved questions about bona fide occupational qualification, state protective laws, sex-segregated classified advertising columns, leave and pay in connection with pregnancy and childbirth, pre-employment inquiries, and retirement and pension benefits.

She drafted some of the EEOC's early digests of Legal Interpretations, its lead decision in the airline stewardess cases,as well as the guidelines on pregnancy, later codified in the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978. To alert her sister feminists to cases coming before the EEOC, Fuentes consulted with other feminists throughout government: Catherine East, Mary Eastwood, and Phineas Indritz. The group then passed on the information to trailblazing feminist attorney Marguerite Rawalt, who put together a cadre of attorneys to represent plaintiffs in those cases.

Based on information Fuentes was providing from the inside, NOW (whose founding Fuentes suggested to Betty Friedan) played an important role in pressuring the EEOC from the outside. Fuentes was one of NOW's first 54 founders and participated in drafting its Statement of Purpose and skeletal bylaws at the October 1966 founders meeting in Washington DC.

Later, she carried her legal skills and feminist commitment into two major corporations, GTE in Stamford, CT, and TRW in Cleveland,OH.

[ Event Schedule ] [ Event Flyer (PDF) ] [ Event Program (PDF) ] [ Event Photos ][ Honorees ] [ Home ]