Born in Portland in 1869, Vida was a driving force for Australian women winning the vote and the right to be elected to parliament in 1902. In doing so, Australia became the first nation in the world to give women full political equality.

Vida also took the suffragette cause internationally and it's believed she was the first Australian to meet a president of the United States in the oval office.

The south-west woman has been featured in the book, You Daughters of Freedom, written by La Trobe University history professor Clare Wright.

Dr Wright said that in her time Vida was an "absolute fixture" on the political scene and it was a disgrace that she had not received proper recognition.

"Australian women were the first to win these rights," she said.

"We didn't give them to them, they won them. It was a struggle and they succeeded and they succeeded earlier then anybody else."

Dr Wright said as a nation we often focused our accomplishments on sport and war, when in fact Australia proved itself on the world stage as a "democratic exemplar and our women led that charge".

She said Vida's mother was from the Western District middle class and she had a huge influence on the path Vida would take.

"Her mother, Isabella, was a feminist and during the depression and then going into the years when women were advocating the vote, Vida would follow her mother around the slums of Collingwood and Fitzroy and she saw the actual toil and struggle and difficulties that women were facing trying to feed and support their families.

"It radicalised and galvanised and politicalised her and she decided that what she wanted to do was spend the rest of her life working for the betterment of all women and children."

In 1891, she and a handful of women took to the streets to collect signatures for a petition to present to parliament calling for women to vote on equal terms with men.

They collected almost 30,000 signatures from women of all walks of life.

"It was the largest petition that had ever been put to parliament at that stage, proving that women in Victoria wanted the vote and Vida went house to house collecting signatures," Dr Wright said.

"She just rose through the ranks of the feminist movement in Victoria and then when the leader of the suffrage movement passed on, Vida took up the mantle.

"She had decided that was what she was going to devote her life to and she took it very seriously... (she) became the leading figure in Victorian suffrage politics and then in Australian suffrage politics and then became our spokesperson internationally for the suffrage cause.

Later, Vida went to Washington and participated in the first international women's suffrage convention with US president Theodore Roosevelt inviting her to the oval office.

"As far as I can determine, she was the first Australian to meet a president of the United States in the oval office and he wanted to meet her because he wanted to see what one of these 'enfranchised women looked like'.

"And he told Vida 'I've got my eye on you down there in Australia'."

Dr Wright said it was easy to forget how disadvantaged women were almost 120 years ago.

"Women winning the vote was about women having the opportunity to take control of the laws that defined their daily lives," she said.

"It's hard for us to remember today how thoroughly disadvantaged women were, legally, economically politically, socially and culturally. They did not have control over their daily lives and it was a spectrum of suffering.

"And for women who were poor, for women who were indigenous, for women who were in anyway marginalised, they were the ones who had the least amount of control and sovereignty over their own bodies and over their own destinies... they couldn't change the conditions of their daily lives because they didn't have the vote."

So committed to her cause, Vida forged a life different from other women of her class and decided not marry.

"She was absolutely a woman of her class... and her education would of expected her to marry well and be the mistress of a household...," Dr Wright said. "And to her that wasn't enough. It wasn't good enough. It wasn't radical enough. It didn't promise to change the world in the way that she wanted it to.

"She had plenty of marriage proposals, she was courted at one stage by John Monash and she turned them down because she had a very definite sense that that was a choice that she had to make.

"That to be a married women with children would prohibit the mobility and the time and social expectations on her to be a mother

"She still considered herself a mother, but a mother of the cause, a mother of the struggle and a mother of the world rather then actually raising her own offspring."

Dr Wright said women like Vida were often overlooked in the telling of Australian history.

"These women are part of our national story," she said. "It's not a footnote or a colourful illustration but an absolutely central part of truth telling about our nation and I do believe that there is a hunger for it.

"At the moment only three per cent of Australian statues are of historic women and there are more statues of animals then there are of women.

Dr Wright has been researching Vida for 15 years and said, despite Vida's failings, she remained in awe of her.

"Vida was a woman of her time... the movement of women's rights was without doubt a movement for white women's rights. But I do believe that if Vida was alive today she would absolutely be fighting for indigenous sovereignty, for truth-telling, for a voice to parliament.

"Those were her values. Those were her principles.

"Do I admire her? Absolutely, she devoted her life to being a political woman. She was brave. She stood for parliament five times and every time she was defeated she got back up and she did it again.

"I think we all have a great deal to learn from her tenacity, from her intelligence, from her humour. She was a woman who lived by her principles her entire life. It's one of my great regrets that I'll never be able to sit at a dinner table with Vida Goldstein."