By Janet Brewer
Ellen Malos, who died in 2023, had come to Bristol from Australia, in 1962. She and her husband John Malos were both seasoned campaigners for workers’ rights, and Ellen had more political experience than many of the women attracted to the growing Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM).
After one particularly fractious meeting in 1973, she clearly stayed awake thinking things through, and worrying about a potential split in the group. She put her thoughts into the February Bristol WLM newsletter under the heading Some thoughts in the night.
This piece below shows Ellen’s optimism, her determination and her endless capacity for listening to both sides of any story.
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Ellen Malos in Bristol Women’s Centre, 1973
Some thoughts in the night
By Ellen Malos
One of the things the Women’s Liberation movement is about is healing the split between the ‘personal’ and the ‘political’. We obviously haven’t managed it yet.
Some of us still feel that there is a vast gulf between the two, and this allows for the kind of hostilities that came out of the discussion of consciousness raising at the last General Meeting. There seems to be a ‘them’ and ‘us’ feeling about, which we have got to tackle if we aren’t going to fragment. We all have to recognise that there is as much danger of the ‘activists’ among us disappearing in our own cloud of dust as there is in the ‘consciousness raisers’ disappearing down their own navels, unless we see both things as two sides of the one coin for the group, the movement as a whole and the individuals in it.
Each emphasis has its own dangers, and either activism or consciousness raising carried on exclusively for ever is death. In practice it doesn’t seem that this is happening, though we can’t always do both, or do both in ideal proportions.
The main problem seems to be that we all no longer know one another and this opens the way to misunderstandings and alienation between different groups and individuals.
We need more general meetings like the last one where groups and individuals can talk about what they are doing and how they see themselves and get things off their chests. We also need a really good relaxed party soon (see notices!) and we need more people from the different groups at the organisation, and some more people to get the confidence to go out and talk to other groups that invite us – so we don’t get divisions between inner and outer circles. And if some of us feel the newsletter is too dry, then we have to get involved enough to change it. We also need to get the Information Centre going, not only as an office but as a place where people can drop in for coffee and to meet one another. We have toys there and will have a cooker, and there’s a garden at the back. But that needs volunteers and MONEY – which we often forget about.. like we forgot to take a collection to pay for the Old England pub where we held the General Meeting.
Let’s hope the meeting cleared the air anyway.