She worked closely with her brothers, managing their bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio when they were away; acting as their right-hand woman and general factotum in Europe; assisting with their correspondence and business affairs; and providing a sounding board for their ideas.

A significant figure in the early-twentieth-century women's movement, she worked on behalf of woman suffrage in Ohio and served as the third female trustee of Oberlin College.

Throughout her teenage years and early adulthood, she pursued her education and teaching career while managing the home she shared with her father, an itinerant preacher, and older brothers.

[6] After they began spending summers at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in 1901, Katharine helped run the shop, pack supplies for their experiments and handled their official correspondence and relations with the press.

[7] As Wilbur and Orville's efforts to market the Wright Flyer took them to Washington, D.C., and Europe, Katharine wrote them letters in which she kept them abreast of the progress of the family businesses, as well as personal and hometown news.

They actually meant 'plane sewing' as they needed someone to stitch the fabrics to cover their planes, but the newspaper which published the advert assumed a misspelling and changed the vowel.

She used French when liaising with European royalty and influential dignitaries like Alfonso XIII, King of Spain, Georges Clémenceau, Alfred Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Northcliffe, and Prince Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia.

[11]French journalists wrote extensively about her, in one instance concocting a story that the "Wright sister" had assisted Wilbur and Orville with their mathematical computations.

[13] In recognition of Katharine's importance to the Wright family team, the French government honored her as an Officier de l'Instruction Publique — one of France's highest academic distinctions — when her brothers received the prestigious Légion d'Honneur in 1909.

In anticipation of an unsuccessful attempt to amend the state constitution, she marched in a suffrage parade in Dayton on October 24, 1914, along with her father and brothers Orville and Lorin.

In 1914, two years after Wilbur's death, Katharine, Orville, and Bishop Milton Wright moved to Hawthorn Hill, a newly constructed mansion in the Dayton suburb of Oakwood.

[17] She played an active behind-the-scenes role in Orville's decades-long struggle with the Smithsonian Institution to gain appropriate recognition for the Wright Brothers' invention.

As only the third female trustee in Oberlin's history,[19] she exerted a strong influence in areas such as faculty and presidential appointments, building plans, and academic freedom.

[4][13] Katharine finally married Harry on November 20, 1926, in a small private ceremony at the Oberlin home of their mutual friend Professor Louis Lord, a well-known classicist.

Their brother Lorin, who had enthusiastically supported Katharine's marriage plans, prevailed on Orville to visit her, and he was at her bedside when she died on March 3, 1929, at age 54.

Featuring a replica of a bronze sculpture by Verrocchio, it stands near the entrance to the Allen Memorial Art Museum, a short distance from the college's Wilbur and Orville Wright Laboratory of Physics.

In 2017, Henry J. Haskell's grandson published Maiden Flight, a work of creative nonfiction about her late-life marriage, followed by a three-part biographical podcast titled In Her Own Wright.

Dramatic treatments of Katharine's life range from one-woman shows to the 2022 opera Finding Wright by composer Laura Kaminsky and librettist Andrea Fellows Fineberg.