My pal Ellen Malos, who has died aged 85, was one of many co-founders in 1972 of the Bristol Ladies’s Centre, a feminist campaigning hub for which she volunteered over plenty of years. Serving as a being pregnant testing centre, in addition to a refuge for girls struggling home violence, the centre initially used the basement of Ellen’s home as an workplace.
Though it was ultimately changed by a community of different initiatives offered by nationwide organisations, a technique or one other Ellen continued as a volunteer and adviser on feminist initiatives and secure homes within the metropolis till her retirement.
She was born in Ballarat, a mining city in Australia, the eldest of the six youngsters of Jack Scarlett, a glazier, and Mabel (nee Ellis), a knitwear employee. Formidably clever and inquiring, with a love of books, after attending Ballarat highschool she studied English and historical past at Melbourne College, the place she met fellow scholar John Malos by means of their mutual curiosity in socialist scholar politics. They married in 1958 and 4 years later moved to the UK.
Settling in Bristol, John turned a physics lecturer at Bristol College, and Ellen started a doctorate on the identical establishment earlier than giving up her research to take care of their two younger youngsters, Rob and Anna.
As soon as that they had develop into youngsters, in 1979 she accomplished a diploma in social administration at Bristol, which helped in her work with the Ladies’s Centre.
In 1979 she contributed to a guide known as Half the Sky: An Introduction to Ladies’s Research, printed by the Bristol Ladies’s Research Group, and in 1980 edited The Politics of Housekeeping, an anthology of feminist essays.
The next yr Ellen turned a part-time lecturer in social coverage at Bristol College, the place she did analysis into violence in opposition to girls. In 1990, together with her educational colleague, Gill Hague, she established the Centre for Gender and Violence Analysis throughout the college’s Faculty for Coverage Research. In 2006 she was given an honorary doctorate by the college.
Feminism, friendship and household have been integral to her life, and she or he repeatedly visited her prolonged household in Australia. With a dry and depraved sense of humour, she was a wonderful companion – and somebody who at all times put others first.
John died in 1995. She is survived by Rob and Anna.
