Ettie Rout: New Zealand’s Safer Sex Pioneer

Description

Title: Ettie Rout: New Zealand’s Safer Sex Pioneer
Author: Jane Tolerton ONZM
Publisher: Penguin New Zealand, 2014
Format: Paperback
Condition: Very Good — slight discolouration on front page otherwise in excellent unread condition.

Description:

Ettie Rout fought a battle for safer sex in the First World War — and won. New Zealand had the lowest venereal disease rate of any Allied force. The soldiers who came home alive and healthy had her prophylactic kit to thank for it, and her tireless work meeting troop trains in Paris and persuading men to protect themselves. None of them would have known her name. She had been banned from NZ newspapers so the public wouldn’t find out what she was doing.

She was also being called a harlot in Parliament.

Rout went to Egypt in 1915, established rest houses for NZ troops, lobbied the military to make prophylactic use compulsory, and then moved to Paris, where she transformed a brothel into a safer sex establishment and stationed herself at railway platforms to intercept soldiers on leave. She proved the case for safer sex decades before the term existed, with a wicked sense of humour, a complete intolerance of hypocrisy, and the patience of someone who understood that the people she was trying to help were going to die if she gave up.

The cover photograph shows her standing among Australian Graves Detachment soldiers at Villiers Bretonneux, France, in July 1919. She is the only woman in the photograph. She looks entirely at ease.

Jane Tolerton won the NZ Book Award for Non-fiction and the PEN Best First Book prize for the original edition of this biography. She later became an Officer of the NZ Order of Merit for services to historical research. This 2014 Penguin NZ edition is updated and revised. It is now out of print.

Why We Stock It:

A woman whose contribution to NZ public health was real, measurable, and deliberately suppressed. The newspapers were told not to name her. Parliament called her a harlot. The soldiers loved her. This is exactly the kind of story The Gravy is here to keep on shelves.

Companion to Make Her Praises Heard Afar by Jane Tolerton, also in stock