Henrietta Longstreet Boggs (6 May 1918 – 9 September 2020) was an American author, journalist, and activist. She served as First Lady of Costa Rica from 1948 to 1949 in the years immediately following the Costa Rican Civil War. She turned 100 in May 2018.[1]
After completing high school, Boggs attended Birmingham–Southern College, where she studied English[4] and was a reporter for the student newspaper.[2] While on a summer vacation, Boggs went to visit her aunt and uncle, who had retired in Costa Rica. While there she met and would later marry José Figueres Ferrer.[5]
Figueres would go on to lead the opposition forces in the 1948 Costa Rican Civil War. Therein he led a successful democratic revolution against the government, abolished the army, and catapulted Boggs to the role of first lady. From that vantage point, she successfully pushed for giving Costa Rican women the right to vote.[6] Over time, Boggs realized that marriage and life in politics were incompatible, given her independent spirit in what was still very much a patriarchal society. Boggs divorced Figueres in 1954, and she took their children to New York City, where she worked for Costa Rica's delegation to the United Nations while pursuing her lifelong passion of writing.[6]
Her return to Alabama in 1969 came with a second marriage to Dr. Hugh MacGuire and her co-founding of River Region Living, the city magazine that she would later sell, but for which she still wrote, up to the time of her death.
