Vida Jane Mary Goldstein was born in Portland, Victoria 13th of April 1869. She was the eldest of five children raised in a middle class home and educated at Presbyterian Ladies College in Melbourne. Tagging alongside her mother she saw that women with larger families would be suffering violence and abuse at the hands at their drunken husbands, while babies starved and children resorted to petty crime. Her father was a strong anti suffragist, but her mother was a suffragist always going to protests trying to do things about it.
Vida devoted her life to improving the lives of women and children. She vowed never to marry, she believed that her own marriage and childbearing would make this goal impossible to achieve. In 1891 she assisted her mother in collecting signatures for a petition for women's suffrage. They collected 30,000 signatures in six weeks, making it the biggest petition in the Victorian givers had ever received. As a 21 year old, most other girls would be starting families but Vida became a political activist, trying to do something about the inequality and unfairness in this world. She stumbled upon some conservative men who believed that the woman's role was to stay home, take care of the kids and clean the house. Vida believed that women should have a say in political acts and laws.
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In the same year Vida was invited to attend an international suffrage convention in America, she impressed President Roosevelt with her intelligence and