Decades before the term ‘safe sex’ was coined, Ettie Rout flouted official directives and fought to protect World War One soldiers from venereal disease. In Paris, she ran a sexual welfare service for the Anzacs – collecting them from the station, guiding them to Madame Yvonne's brothel, which she regularly inspected, looking after the sick and running a counselling service. Her prophylactic kit was eventually – and controversially – adopted by both the New Zealand and Australian governments. Armed with a wicked sense of humour, an intolerance of hypocrisy and boundless energy, Ettie Rout championed socialism and sexual freedom. Ettie Rout: New Zealand's safe-sex pioneer celebrates an unlikely – and largely unsung – heroine in the New Zealand World War One story. A woman ahead of her time. Also available as an eBook
Jane Tolerton is a Wellington writer. Having studied History and American Studies at the University of Canterbury, she became a newspaper reporter and magazine feature writer, winning the Dulux News Award and the Cowan Prize for Historical Journalism. She and Nicholas Boyack set up the World War One Oral History Archive while based at the Stout Research Centre at Victoria University of Wellington in 1987. They interviewed 84 veterans and produced In the Shadow of War (1990). Tolerton's bestselling An Awfully Big Adventure: New Zealand World War One veterans tell their stories, is a chronological oral history of the war edited from the interviews. It was one of the New Zealand Listener's 100 Best Books of 2013. Her other oral history books are Convent Girls (1984), Sixties Chicks (1987) and It's Time We Started Telling These Stories (2008), which was part of the It's Not Okay campaign against family violence. Tolerton won a New Zealand Book Award and PEN Best First Book prize for Ettie: A Life of Ettie Rout (1992). She decided to write a shorter, more accessible version of Ettie Rout's safer sex campaign as part of the centennial commemoration of the First World War.