About
Feltex-winning TV series Pioneer Women dramatised the lives of groundbreaking New Zealand women. This episode looks at the story of controversial safe-sex campaigner Ettie Rout. In World War I she travelled to Egypt to care for Kiwi soldiers. There she found venereal disease was rife, and recommended that prophylactic kits be issued and that brothels be inspected for hygiene. To the establishment, her pioneering ideas on health, sex and gender were ‘immoral’ and received with hostility. But the RSA and some doctors considered her a “guardian angel of the ANZACs”.
