Dorothy Russell grew up in Plymouth, Massachusetts, and studied Household Economics at Simmons. She was involved in Glee Club and Choir, and her classmates remembered her as an effective speaker, writing in her senior yearbook entry, “when suffrage for women wins out, we foresee a great future for Dorothy on account of her ability to set forth all matters clearly and at length.” Russell graduated in 1914 and took a job as a technical assistant at the Boston City Hospital in 1916. While there, she assisted the hospital’s Dr. W.R. Ohler in laboratory work, and later worked as a research chemist at the Boston Consumptives’ Hospital in Mattapan. She likely also worked as an instructor of Home Economics in Rhode Island between hospital jobs. Russell married Chester Morton Dunham of Roslindale in 1917 and later lived in Waltham, Massachusetts. Details of her later life and her suffrage views remain unknown.