Ettie Rout: New Zealand’s safer sex pioneer - Jane Tolerton

Jane Tolerton's Ettie Rout: New Zealand's safer sex pioneer honours an irreverent, heroic figure of the New Zealand World War One story. A safe-sex campaigner ahead of her time.

Ettie Rout fought a battle for safer sex in the First World War — and won.

She gave New Zealand the best sexual health system when its army adopted her prophylactic kit and made every soldier going on leave take one — while she was banned from the pages of the newspapers so New Zealanders wouldn't find out.

In Paris, having transformed Madame Yvonne's into a safer sex brothel, she met soldiers at the railway station and convinced them to go there if they chose to have sex.

Armed with a wicked sense of humour, an intolerance of hypocrisy and boundless energy, Ettie Rout proved the case for safer sex decades before the term was coined — and the soldiers loved her for it.

This book celebrates an unlikely heroine of the First World War who is now internationally recognised for waging a successful public health crusade. A woman way ahead of her time.

Penguin, 2015. Paperback, 256 pages. Photographs (black and white), notes, bibliography and index. 

ISBN: 9780143573241

Condition: secondhand paperback in very good condition.