Sonia Pressman Fuentes, an early women’s rights lawyer who told the feminist author Betty Friedan that women needed an advocacy group to fight for them the way the N.A.A.C.P. fought for Black Americans, planting the seed for the National Organization for Women, died on Dec. 20 in Sarasota, FL. She was 97.

In 1965, Mrs. Fuentes became the first female lawyer in the general counsel’s office at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, a new agency that had been created to enforce Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Invited to speak to employers and unions about the new anti-discrimination law, Ms. Fuentes found that “any reference to women’s rights was greeted with laughter,” she wrote in a 1999 memoir.

In June 1966, Ms. Friedan and 27 others chipped in $5 each to create what became the National Organization for Women, eventually the largest feminist group in the country. NOW became the catalyst for significant change in the workplace and at home.

Later, Mrs. Fuentes worked in the private sector. She resigned after three years, unhappy there. “I was uncomfortable in the corporate world,” she wrote. “It was not the place for an outspoken, independent, liberal Jewish woman, who wanted to change the way things were done.”