EAT FIRST--YOU DON''T KNOW WHAT THEY''LL GIVE YOU
The Adventures of an Immigrant Family and Their Feminist
Daughter, a memoir written with warmth and humor, is the story of Sonia Pressman Fuentes, one of the pioneers of the Second Wave of the women''s
movement, and her family.
Sonia was born in Berlin, Germany, of Polish parents, with whom she came
to the U.S. as a child to escape the Holocaust. Her memoir reveals how this
five-year-old immigrant in 1934 grew up to become the first woman attorney
in the Office of the General Counsel at the Equal Employment Opportunity
Commission (EEOC) in 1965, one of the founders of the National Organization
for Women (NOW) in 1966, the highest-paid woman at the headquarters of two
multinational corporations--GTE and TRW, and an international speaker on
women''s rights for the U.S. Information Agency.
The story begins with the wedding of Sonia''s parents, Hinda and Zysia
Pressman, in Piltz, a town in Poland. It goes on to the adventures of the
Pressmans and Fuentes in Berlin, Antwerp, the Bronx, the Catskills,Miami
Beach, Los Angeles, Cleveland, Stamford (Connecticut), and Washington, D.C.
Along the way, Fuentes had encounters with Pat Ward (a notorious call girl
in the ''50s), Betty Friedan, Harry Golden, Dr. Cecil Jacobson (a prominent
geneticist convicted on 52 counts of perjury and fraud), and many others.
Sonia played a major role in the birth of the new women''s movement and her tales of its early days will delight historians and those who are curious about the beginnings of this great social movement. Sonia is a born storyteller, with a particular knack for seeing the humorous aspects of her life. Evoking a tear here and a chuckle there, with her heartwarming wit and
wisdom, Sonia recounts the story of a Jewish family, her family, from her grandparents'' origin in a village in Poland right through her own career as a founder of NOW and beyond.
Sonia graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Cornell University in
1950 and first in her class at the University of Miami School of Law in
1957. She had a 36-year career as an attorney and executive with the
federal government and multinational corporations. She drafted many of the
EEOC''s initial landmark guidelines and decisions. In addition to being one
of the founders of NOW, she was also a founder of Federally Employed Women
(FEW). In November 1996, Betty Friedan presented her with the Veteran
Feminists of America (VFA) Medal of Honor in recognition of her work to
improve the status of women.
On October 10, 1999, Sonia received the 1999 Women at Work Award given
by Wider Opportunities for Women (WOW) in Washington, D.C. Prior awardees
include Glenn Close, Jane Fonda, Katie Couric, and Hillary Rodham Clinton.
On March 21, 2000, Sonia was one of five women inducted into the Maryland
Women''s Hall of Fame for the year 2000. Later that year, the U.N. High
Commissioner for Refugees included Fuentes in its Gallery of Prominent
Refugees.
She is included in
Women of Achievement in Maryland History,
published in
October 2002. Her article on how being an immigrant affected her life is
included in
120 HIAS Stories, published in July 2002. On March 18, 2005,
she was one of four recipients of the Immigrant Achievement Award given by
the American Immigration Law Foundation in Washington, D.C. She is included
in
Feminists Who Changed America 1963-1975, and
What Happened to the Children who Fled Nazi Persecution, bothpublished in 2006.
On May 6, 2005, she was one of 10 women activists honored as foremothers of
the women''s movement at a luncheon of The National Research Center for Women and Families in Washington, D.C. She is one of 74 Jewish women included in an exhibit of the Jewish Women''s Archive on Jewish women who contributed to women''s rights in the U.S. at http://www.jwa.org/feminism. Sonia is included in an online exhibit of the Jewish Women''s Archive--at
http://jwa.org/feminism-- called Jewish Women and the Feminist Revolution.
This exhibit consists of 74 Jewish women who made significant contributions
to the women''s rights movement in the U.S. Sonia will be honored by the Veteran Feminists of America at an all-day program at the Harvard Club in New York City on June 9, 2008, honoring 29 feminist lawyers, including U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who fought for women’s rights in the 1960s and ‘70s. She is featured in an upcoming documentary about the second wave of the women’s movement called
Wavelength and a play based on
Eat First is currently being written.
Eat First was required reading for courses at Cornell University and at
American University.
The book was published in paperback and hardback by Xlibris Corporation
and as an e-book for downloading or on a CD. It is also available from
amazon.com and in the U.K. from amazon.co.uk. For more information, see Sonia’s website at http://www.erraticimpact.com/fuentes