Eat First -- You Don't Know What They'll Give You - Softcover

Fuentes, Sonia Pressman

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0738806358 ISBN 13: 9780738806358

Publisher: Xlibris US, 1999

Synopsis

EAT FIRST--YOU DONT KNOW WHAT THEYLL GIVE YOU, written with warmth and humor, is the story of Sonia Pressman Fuentes, one of the pioneers of the Second Wave of the womens movement and her family. Fuentes, who was born in Berlin, Germany, came to the US with her immediate family to escape the Holocaust. Her memoirs reveal how the five-year-old immigrant in 1934 became 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 womens rights for the US Information Agency.

The story begins with the wedding of Fuentes 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, DC. 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 fifty-two counts of perjury and fraud), and many others. At forty-two, she married a handsome Puerto Rican and 1 years later, her Puerto Rican Jewish daughter was born. She tells about it all in Eat First.

"I walk in the footprints of Sonia Pressman Fuentes."

--Patricia Ireland, president, NOW

"Evoking a tear here and a chuckle there, with her heart-

warming wit and wisdom, Sonia Pressman Fuentes recounts the story of a Jewish family, her family, from her grandparents origin in a shtettl in Poland right through her own career as a founder of NOW and beyond."

--Gus Tyler, columnist, contributing editor, The Forward

"Sonia Pressman Fuentes played a major role in the birth of the new womens movement and her tales of its early days will delight historians and those who are curious about the beginnings of this great social movement. Fuentes is a born story-teller, with a particular knack for seeing the humorous aspects of her life."

--Dr. Bernice Sandler, Senior Scholar in Residence, National Association for Women in Education

"I referred to you just the other day (as I frequently do)

as one of the `great, unsung heroes of the womens and civil rights movements. You single-handedly persuaded Roosevelt, Edelsberg, me and others to take sex discrimination seriously which, without you, we would not have done."

--Charles T. Duncan, former General Counsel, EEOC;

former Corporation Counsel of the District of Columbia; former Dean, Howard University School of Law

For more reviews and interviews with the author of Eat First--You Dont Know What Theyll Give You, please visit http://www.erraticimpact.com/fuentes

About this title

About the Author

Sonia Pressman Fuentes is a lawyer, writer, and speaker. She was the first woman attorney in the General Counsel's Office at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and a founder of the National Organization for Women (NOW). In 1996, she received the Veteran Feminists of America Medal of Honor.

Review

EAT FIRST--YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT THEY'LL GIVE YOU, The Adventures of an Immigrant Family and Their Feminist Daughter, by Sonia Pressman Fuentes is the story of an extraordinary woman at an extraordinary time in our country's history. It is the story of a five-year-old immigrant girl who came to this country with her family to escape the Holocaust and grew up to become a founder of the Second Wave of the women's movement.

Ms. Fuentes is a natural storyteller and through her tales and anecdotes we come to know her parents, her brother, and Sonia, herself. The tale begins with her father's running away from his own wedding in a small Polish town, only to be rounded up by incensed village folk determined that a wedding would take place. It moves on to Sonia's birth and the family's flight from the Nazi reign of terror in 1930s Germany, first to Belgium and then to the United States. We come to know her family through the wry humor and warm understanding of the author and feel we know them as we would our own next-door neighbors. Our heroine does, indeed, survive being a stranger in a strange land, grows up, goes to college and then law school and becomes one of the founding mothers of the National Organization for Women and a champion of women's rights in the primary government agency charged with enforcing those rights. Along the way, she gets married, has a child, gets divorced, raises her daughter as a single mother, and is one of the forces for change in women's status that sweep this country in the 1960s and '70s. Her unique family and perspective shine in these memoirs and the reader feels a kinship with her and her family's struggles, their love, and their determination because it speaks to us all of our own. -- Becky Barbour, Writer and Book Reviewer, Columbus, Ohio

About this edition

• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0738806358
• ISBN 13: 9780738806358
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 340