In 1857 Wilbour was secretary of the Michigan Yearly Meeting of the Friends of Human Progress, a radical Quaker offshoot.
In 1872 she addressed the Judiciary Committee of the New York State Assembly on the topic of “Why we ask the ballot.” She also continued her spiritual work, sometimes combining it with her politics.
In 1874 she addressed the Assembly of Spiritualists, arguing that the public speaking platform was “the people’s arena,” a democratic alternative to the pulpit.
The pulpit “may seem fit for the solitary despot whose empire it has sometimes served” but on the platform, “Virtue is the only strength—Reason the only test—and Spiritual Power the only exaltation.”[4] Wilbour was one of the founders of Sorosis, the first professional women's club in America, in 1868.
It was an organization, its founding letter suggested, where these topics “might be offered, discussed and acted upon, and that mutual counsel and help might be rendered.”[6] In 1874 the Wilbours moved to France, with extensive visits to Egypt.
Her daughter, Theodora Wilbour, began a series of anonymous gifts of English silver to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in honor of her mother in 1933.