Ellen Malos

Malos was born in Ballarat, Victoria, Australia in 1937.[1] She was the first of five children. Her father was a long time socialist, glazier and decorator and her mother had made knitwear. At primary and Sunday school she discovered a love of books.[1]

She 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.[1] 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 masters degree and he completed his doctorate.[1]

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.[2] In 1969 she was living in Bristol when the first women's group was formed.[3] In 1973 she gave over the basement of her house in Bristol to become the city's first women's centre.[4]

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.[5]

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.[6] In 2019 Professor Hague was awarded a CBE for her contribution to combating violence against women.[7]

In 2007 Next Link, a British domestic abuse support service, named their Women's Safe House "Ellen Malos House" to record her contribution.[8]

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.[4][9]

She married a fellow socialist John Malos, an Australian of Greek heritage.[1]

• 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.