Career
As a high school graduate, Detzer decided to forgo the traditional college course, opting instead to travel in the Far East and live for a time in the Philippines. Returning to the United States., she went to live at Hull House, attending the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy while working as an officer of the Juvenile Protective Association. At the end of World War I, she spent a year in Austria doing relief work for the American Friends Service Committee (Air Force Specialty Code).
She later spent two years in Russia as an Air Force Specialty Code famine relief administrator in the Volga valley.
Upon her return to the United States. in 1924, Detzer assumed the national secretaryship of WILPF, United States. Section. Detzer lobbied for the initiation of numerous legislative investigations, notably one launched by Senator Gerald P. Nye on the munitions industry (1933–1936).
The events of two decades in Washington are chronicled in her book Appointment on the Hill (1948) which was written the year after she resigned her post with WILPF. Shortly before her husband"s death in 1970, the Dennys left Washington, District of Columbia for the West Coast, where Dorothy Detzer Denny remained in Monterey, California, until her death.
