[1] She graduated from Rosemary Hall School in Connecticut and attended Bryn Mawr College.

[2] She left Bryn Mawr after two years, to help her mother with social duties at the American embassies in Beijing and Berlin.

[3] Schurman lived with her parents in China, and moved with them to Berlin in 1925,[4] when her father was American ambassador to Germany.

[7] Hawes wrote a series of articles about the trade history between the United States and China for the Essex Institute,[8] based on ships' logs and other primary sources archived in Massachusetts,[9] and compiled the series into a book, To the Farthest Gulf: The Story of the American China Trade (1941).

[2][18] Dorothy Schurman Hawes' book, To the Farthest Gulf, was reissued in 1990, and is still cited by scholars,[19] and found on suggested reading lists for the topic.