Jacob, born at Cork, Ireland, on 10 March 1839 of Polish, Jewish and Irish stock, arrived in Victoria in 1858 and settled initially at Portland.

Here Jacob became heavily involved in charitable and social welfare causes, working closely with the Melbourne Charity Organisation Society, the Women's Hospital Committee, the Cheltenham Men's Home and the labour colony at Leongatha.

When the family income was affected by the depression in Melbourne during the 1890s, Vida and her sisters, Aileen and Elsie, ran a co-educational preparatory school in St Kilda.

Historian, Clare Wright, states that "Vida's mother also led her eldest daughter into the work that would ultimately consume her life: the struggle for women's rights.

"[2] She would stay on the periphery of the women's movement through the 1890s, but her primary interest during this period was with her school and urban social causes – particularly the National Anti-Sweating League and the Criminology Society.

This work gave her first-hand experience of women's social and economic disadvantages, which she would come to believe were a product of their political inequality.

She became a popular public speaker on women's issues, orating before packed halls around Australia and eventually Europe and the United States.

She always campaigned on fiercely independent and strongly left-wing platforms which made it difficult for her to attract high support at the ballot.

[11] In 1909, having closed the Sphere in 1905 to dedicate herself more fully to the campaign for female suffrage in Victoria, she founded a second newspaper – Woman Voter.

In the UK, Adelaide-born Muriel Matters was at the forefront of peaceful public campaigns advocating for women's suffrage, and gained global attention for her part in the "Grille Incident", which resulted in the dismantling of the grille, a piece of ironwork placed at the front of the Ladies' Gallery of the House of Commons that obscured their view of parliamentary proceedings.

Her speeches around the country drew huge crowds and her tour was touted as "the biggest thing that has happened in the women movement for some time in England".

[14] She included visits to Holiday Campaigns in the Lake District for Liverpool WPSU organiser Alice Davies, along with fellow activist and writer Beatrice Harraden.

Mary Blathwayt's parents were the hosts and they planted trees there between April 1909 and July 1911 to commemorate the achievements of suffragettes, including Adela's mother and sister, Christabel as well as Annie Kenney, Charlotte Despard, Millicent Fawcett and Lady Lytton.

[20] Her trip in England concluded with the foundation of the Australia and New Zealand Women Voters Association, an organisation dedicated to ensuring that the British Parliament would not undermine suffrage laws in the antipodean colonies.

Despite many suitors, she never married and she lived in her last years with her two sisters, Aileen (who also never wed) and Elsie (the widow of Henry Hyde Champion).

[5] Although her death passed largely unnoticed at the time, Goldstein would later come to be recognised as a pioneer suffragist and important figure in Australian social history, and a source of inspiration for many later female generations.

[29][30] Vida Goldstein appears as a major character in the Wendy James novel, Out of the Silence, which examined the case of Maggie Heffernan, a young Victorian woman who was convicted of drowning her infant son in Melbourne, in 1900.