Ellen Malos

Ellen Malos (née Scarlett, 21 November 1937 – 22 August 2023) was an Australian-British scholar and activist associated with Bristol Women's Aid, and a key figure in Bristol's Women's Liberation Movement.

Early life and career

Ellen Scarlett was born in Ballarat, Victoria, Australia on 21 November 1937. She was the first of five children. Her father was a longtime socialist, glazier and decorator, and her mother had made knitwear. At primary and Sunday school she discovered a love of books.

Malos committed to teach in order to obtain a scholarship. She studied English and history at Melbourne University. She wrote a prize-winning thesis about the novelist Patrick White. She had to take up supply teaching as she was discriminated against because she was married. Her husband lost his job because her was a socialist. She studied for a master's degree and he completed his doctorate.

In 1962 she came to the UK with her husband and two-year-old son. She started a doctorate but had to abandon it as her supervisor that it unbelievable that a woman would try and get a Ph.D. while she had a child to care for. In 1969 she was living in Bristol when the first women's group was formed. In 1973 she gave over the basement of her house in Bristol to become the city's first women's centre.

The British Library have recorded an oral library from her. In 1971 she remembers how a man who spoke at a Women's Liberation Movement meeting of "fighting for Women's Liberation all my life" but condemning lesbians, was dragged off the platform.

In 1990, Gill Hague and Ellen Malos founded a Violence Against Women Research Group. This would become the Centre for Gender and Violence Research at the University of Bristol. In 2019 Professor Hague was awarded a CBE for her contribution to combating violence against women.

In 2007 Next Link, a British domestic abuse support service, named their Women's Safe House "Ellen Malos House" to record her contribution.

The National Lottery funded "Feminist Archive South" to hire a part-time archivist to catalogue Malos's archives. Her archives, which cover an important period of Bristol Women's history, are now part of the Special Collections at the University of Bristol.

Personal life and death

In 1958, she married fellow socialist John Malos, an Australian of Greek heritage. He died in 1995. Ellen Mallos died at home on 22 August 2023, at the age of 85.

Publications

• Ellen Malos, ed. (1980). The Politics of Housework. Allison & Busby.
• Emma Bullard; Ellen Malos; R A Parker (1991). Custodianship : caring for other people's children. HMSO.
• Gill Hague; Ellen Malos; Wendy Dear (1996). Multi-agency work and domestic violence: a national study of inter-agency initiatives. Policy Press.
• Mullender, Audrey; Thangam Debbonaire; Liz Kelly; Gill Hague; Ellen Malos (May 1998). "Working with children in women's refuges". Child & Family Social Work. 3 (2): 87–98. doi:10.1046/j.1365-2206.1998.00074.x.
• Audrey Mullender; Liz Kelly; Linda Regan; Gill Hague; Umme Imam; Ellen Malos (2002). Children's Perspectives on Domestic Violence. London: SAGE. ISBN 9780761971061.
• Tina Skinner; Marianne Hester; Ellen Malos, eds. (11 January 2013). Researching Gender Violence. Routledge.