Ettie Rout is most famous as a safe sex campaigner in the First World War, setting up a safe sex brothel and designing a safe sex kit which was officially adopted by the NZEF and handed out compulsorily to all soldiers going on leave.
Life in Christchurch
She lived in Christchurch from 1896 to 1915, where she was a strikingly alternative figure for a woman of her time. After becoming a court shorthand writer, she set up her own public typing business with Horace Gilby in Chancery Lane. She reported for the Lyttelton Times, she was a cyclist and physical fitness advocate who wore unorthodox clothes: short skirts, mens’ boots, trousers and no corsets. She had “advanced” ideas on sexuality, was a socialist and freethinker, and was a close friend of the radical thinker Professor A.W. Bickerton.
First World War
During the First World War she set up the New Zealand Volunteer Sisterhood and took a group of women to Egypt to care for New Zealand soldiers. Here she encountered the problems with the high rate of venereal disease among the soldiers and launched her controversial campaign.
Post war life
After the war she lived in London and wrote a number of books including Sex and exercise, Safe Marriage (a contraceptive and prophylactic manual for women which was banned in New Zealand, though not in Britain and Australia), a vegetarian cookbook, and a book about Māori culture called Māori Symbolism, though this last title has been described as ‘largely inaccurate’.
She died in the Cook Islands in 1936.
In 1988 an AIDS clinic was opened in Christchurch called the Ettie Rout Clinic and later the Ettie Rout Centre. There is a plaque in her honour in Victoria Square.
Ettie Rout resources
- Ettie Rout books by and about Ettie in our collection
- Ettie Rout New Zealand Dictionary of Biography
- Ettie Rout on NZHistory.govt.nz
- Tolerton, Jane Ettie: a life of Ettie Rout,1992
- Records relating to Ettie Rout on ArchivesSpace
- Ettie Rout episode from Pioneer Women, a 1983 television series about groundbreaking New Zealand Women