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  • Interviews of, and Articles about, Sonia

Interviews of, Articles about, and Books that Include Sonia

Articles about Sonia are also contained in the section on Belgium.

Sonia Pressman Fuentes

Excerpt from It Changed My Life: Readings on the Women's Movement

Betty Friedan credited Sonia with giving her the idea to start the organization, which subsequently became NOW, in her book It Changed My Life: Readings on the Women’s Movement  (Harvard University Press, 1976, p. 115.) as follows:

 And then a young `Assistant to the General Counsel’ of the Equal Employment Opportunities [sic] Commission started to talk.  She had been avoiding me for months.  Some of those supposed to enforce that law against sex discrimination had begun to get uneasy about my research.  Sonia Pressman shut her office door and said, `I'm not a feminist.  I've never been interested in women.  I like men.  I don't want to keep realizing how this law could be used to get rid of discrimination against women, and have to keep shutting myself up, every day.  I get so mad at the way they're not doing it.  I go home every night with a headache.  Who appointed me to worry about women?  But I'm not free to do anything about it.  I'd lose my job.  I need the job.  At least a woman like me has to stay here and watch.  But you can do what has to be done.  Nobody can fire you.  Your fame is based on speaking out for women.  You have to start a national organization to fight for women, like the civil rights movement for the blacks.’ And there were tears in her eyes.