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Rout with Kiwi soldiers in lemon squeezer hats relaxing in Egypt .
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In July 1915, during the
Gallipoli campaign, activist Ettie Rout set up the New Zealand Volunteer Sisterhood and
invited women between the ages of 30 and 50 to go to Egypt to care for New
Zealand soldiers, the first batch of 12 volunteers sent to Cairo. Becoming aware of the soldiers' high venereal disease rate,she saw this as a
medical, not a moral, problem and recommended the issue of
prophylactic kits and the establishment of inspected brothels.
The New Zealand Medical Corps opposed her views as did other groups, churchmen . She opened the Tel El Kebir
Soldiers' Club, and later a canteen at El Qantara, to provide better rest and
recreation facilities and better food. For this work she was mentioned in
dispatches and in the Australian official war history.
In June 1917 she went to London to push the
New Zealand Medical Corps into adopting prophylactic measures. She combined the
work of several researchers to produce her own prophylactic kit, containing
calomel ointment, condoms and Condy's crystals (potassium permanganate). She
sold these at the New Zealand Medical Soldiers Club, which she set up at
Hornchurch near the New Zealand Convalescent Hospital.
At the end of 1917 the
New Zealand Expeditionary Force adopted her kit and made it a free and
compulsory distribution to soldiers going on leave. Ettie Rout received no
credit for her role in the kit's development and adoption, and for the duration
of the war the Cabinet banned her from New Zealand newspapers under the War
Regulations. Mention of her brought a potential £100 fine after one of her
letters, suggesting kits and hygienic brothels, had been published in the New
Zealand Times. This letter was responsible for the Minister of Defence, James Allen, approving the issue of the
kit. Others, particularly women's groups, accused her of trying to make vice
safe. Lady Stout led a deputation of women to ask the Prime Minister, William
Massey, to put an end to Rout's club.
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Born in Tasmania , Rout was a court shorthand typist in New Zealand, ran the Maoriland Worker for the shearers union, suicided in the Cook Islands.
