Ettie Annie Rout was born in Tasmania in 1877. With her family, she sailed to Wellington in 1884. A bright, determined girl, Ettie won a high school scholarship but hard times forced the Routs to move to Christchurch, where Ettie learned shorthand and set up a public typing business. She cut an independent figure, cycling around the town, and favouring men's boots and dashing skirts. Her politics were socialist, her outlook spirited, her beliefs feminist and far removed from hidebound conventions of the strait-laced city, especially on the subject of sex.
New Zealand troops in Egypt at the start of the war, and later in London and Paris, could not resist the temptations of the flesh. Cairo teemed with prostitutes. Soldiers on leave in England and France were eager for women.
Some men treated for sexual infections paid a heavy price and were sent back to New Zealand in shame as virtual criminals.
Historian Glyn Harper, in his book Johnny Enzed, cites a 1919 memorandum which says "12,000 to 13,000 men of the NZEF have contracted VD during the war". From the army's perspective, infected soldiers were lost to action. Contracting the "clap" was considered a military offence.
Rout believed sexual diseases were health issues, not moral matters. Her first initiative was the New Zealand Volunteer Sisterhood which, in defiance of public mutterings, saw a dozen women go to Cairo to care for Kiwi soldiers.
Rout arrived in Egypt in February 1916 and recorded visiting the Wazza, Cairo's red-light district, and finding queues of troops "waiting their turn". She opened a popular club and canteen, which saw her efforts earn a mention in dispatches and an entry in the Australian official war history.
Strait-laced New Zealand authorities, though, would not embrace her promotion of prophylactic kits and sanctioned brothels.
So Rout moved to London, and in mid-1917 produced her own safe-sex package containing condoms, an ointment and Condy's crystals. She sold them to soldiers at a club near the New Zealand convalescent hospital at Hornchurch in Essex. Eventually the moral ground shifted and the NZEF adopted the kit and gave it free to soldiers on leave.
Rout's work continued to outrage conservative elements at home. The wife of the Chief Justice Sir Robert Stout urged Prime Minister William Massey to close the Hornchurch club. Newspapers risked a 100 fine if they reported Rout's activities.
Undeterred, Rout went to France, where she greeted New Zealand soldiers arriving in Paris with a peck on the cheek and directions to Madame Yvonne's brothel for clean women.
It was set up with the help of French venereologist Dr Jean Tissot, and Rout had arranged daily doctors' examinations for the working girls.
Author Jane Tolerton, in her award-winning biography of Rout, quotes a soldier's encounter with Ettie in Paris: "The Christchurch women wanted her hung, drawn and quartered. All I could think of was the number of New Zealanders she might have saved from trouble."
After the war, Ettie married Fred Hornibrook, and wrote Safe Marriage, a primer on safe sex and health. The book, a bestseller in Britain, was banned in New Zealand. She ventured home once, before sailing for Rarotonga where, suffering from malaria and, it appears, depression, she took a fatal dose of quinine in September 1936 and was laid to rest in the Avarua cemetery.
