Wiggin was an active and popular hostess in New York and in the community of Upper Largo, Scotland, where she had a summer home and where she organized plays for many years, as detailed in her autobiography
My Garden of Memory. Wiggin was
anti-suffrage, she testified before a Congressional committee on
women’s suffrage, stating that if women were as strong as they ought to be, they should be regularly consulted, to advise, collaborate, and contribute alongside men wherever their unique strengths were valuable. In her view, if women fully embraced and exercised these roles, they would not require the right to vote. Speaking to a group of anti-suffragists in
Washington in April 1912, she added that she preferred women to be “strong enough to remain slightly in the background,” arguing that “the limelight never makes anything grow.” According to
The Western Sentinel of
Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Wiggin believed that it was “more difficult to be an inspiring woman than to be a good citizen or an honest voter.” In 1921, she and her sister edited an edition of
Jane Porter's
The Scottish Chiefs, an 1809 novel of
William Wallace, for the Scribner's Illustrated Classics series, illustrated by
N.C. Wyeth. During the spring of 1923, Wiggin traveled to England as a New York delegate to the
Dickens Fellowship. There she became ill and died, at age 66, of bronchial pneumonia. At her request, her ashes were brought home to Maine and scattered over the Saco River. Wiggin's autobiography was published after her death. In sorting through material for it, she put many items in a box she and her sister labelled "posthumous", and from these materials her sister later published her own reminiscences of Wiggin, titled
Kate Douglas Wiggin as Her Sister Knew Her. Wiggin was also a songwriter and composer. For "Kindergarten Chimes" (1885) and other collections for children, she wrote some of the lyrics, music, and arrangements. For "Nine Love Songs and a Carol", (1896), she composed all of the music. ==Legacy==