Early Years
Vida Goldstein was born in Portland, Victoria, the eldest child of Jacob Goldstein and Isabella (née Hawkins). Her father was an Irish immigrant and officer in the Victorian Garrison Artillery. Her mother was a suffragist, a teetotaller and worked for social reform. Both parents were devout Christians with strong social consciences. They would have four more children after Vida - three daughters (Lina, Elsie and Aileen) and a son (Selwyn)They all married except for Vida and Aileen though Vida had many proposals.
After living in Portland and Warrnambool, the Goldsteins moved to Melbourne in 1877. 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. Although an anti-suffragist Jacob Goldstein believed strongly in education and self-reliance. He engaged a private governess to educate his four daughters and Vida was sent to Presbyterian Ladies' College in 1884, matriculating in 1886. 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. Opening in 1892, the 'Ingleton' school would run out of the family home on Alma Road for the next six years.
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