Important personalitiesBack

Born in Launceston, Tasmania, Australia, she was raised in Wellington, New Zealand from 1884. After leaving school, she became a shorthand typist for commissions of inquiry and the then Supreme Court (now the High Court, and not to be confused with the present Supreme Court). Biographers believe this job gave her a wide range of experiences on social issues. She was later a reporter, businessperson, and writer, but most importantly, she was a campaigner on sexually transmitted infections.

Ettie Rout's experiences founding a volunteer nursing group during World War I, the New Zealand Volunteer Sisterhood, made her aware of the prevalence of STI among servicemen. By 1917, the New Zealand Army had made free distribution of her safe sex kit compulsory. It was for work in Paris, inspecting brothels and recommending them to arriving servicemen, and in the Somme, that she was decorated by the French. In 1917 she and several other New Zealand nurses were Mentioned in Despatches by General Sir Archibald Murray

Ironically, in New Zealand, her exploits were considered such that her name, on pain of a £100 fine, could not be published. However though, her activities could be published.

Similar ironies were found overseas; her 1922 book, Safe Marriage: A Return to Sanity, was banned in New Zealand, but published in both Australia and Britain. In the latter, it was a best-seller. However, in the House of Lords, a bishop called her 'the wickedest woman in Britain.

Rout died as the result of a quinine overdose in Rarotonga in the Cook Islands following her sole postwar return to New Zealand in 1936. She is interred at an Avarua church cemetery. In 1992, Jane Tolerton wrote her biography, and more recently, she has been more critically perceived as a "White Australasia" apologist in Phillippa Levine's account of contagious disease legislation within the late nineteenth century British Empire.

In 1983 an episode of the New Zealand television series Pioneer Women dramatised her story.