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.

Ellen Scarlett was born in Ballarat, Victoria, Australia, on 21 November 1937.^[1][2] 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.^[1]

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.^[1] She had to take up supply teaching as she was discriminated against because she was married. Her husband lost his job because he was a socialist. She studied for a master's 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.^[3] In 1969, she was living in Bristol when the first women's group was formed.^[4] In 1973, she gave over the basement of her house in Bristol to become the city's first women's centre.^[5]

The British Library have an oral history recording from her. She recalled how in 1971 a man who spoke at a Women's Liberation Movement meeting of "fighting for Women's Liberation all my life", while condemning lesbians, was dragged off the platform.^[6]

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.^[7] In 2019, Professor Hague was appointed a CBE for her contribution to combating violence against women.^[8]

In 2007, Next Link, a British domestic abuse support service, named their Women's Safe House "Ellen Malos House" to record her contribution.^[9]

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.^[5][10]

In 1958, she married fellow socialist John Malos, an Australian of Greek heritage.^[1] He died in 1995. Ellen Malos died at home on 22 August 2023, at the age of 85.^[11][2]

• 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.